Susan Wides

An immersive installation of photographic works by Susan Wides, “Voice of Silence” examines perception, embodiment, and ecological presence. Made in single exposures along the tributaries and forest floors of the Catskill Mountain cloves, Wides’s photographs form a dialogue with Peter Halley’s permanent wall painting, Steven Holl’s architecture, and the surrounding woodlands.

A central aspect of Wides’s practice is the shift from looking at a subject to perceiving the conditions of experience itself.

Working directly on-site, Wides uses calibrated movements of the camera’s focal plane to register the instability and vitality of perception. The images arise from walking, sensory awareness, and sustained attention to water, wind, rock, and vegetation. Water—its movement, reflectivity, and continual re-formation—acts as both subject and structuring force, registering impermanence and ecological change. Rather than depicting landscape, the work reveals what philosopher Alva Noë describes as the action in perception—the embodied, multisensory adjustments through which the world becomes experience. Inspired by contemporary neuroscience, the photographs function as carriers of visceral feeling, with color and spatial ambiguity operating prior to subject matter. In this, the work resists the long cultural suspicion of color—chromophobia—positioning chromatic experience as a primary mode of thought and embodied perception.

The architectural environment intensifies these conditions. Holl’s building, with its precisely proportioned apertures and direct engagement with the surrounding woods, mediates natural light across the gallery, articulating an interpenetration of exterior and interior—nature and mind. Throughout the seasons, drifting, dappled light interacts with the images, making the installation temporally responsive and integrated with the landscape. Wides’s extensive experience as curator of ‘T’ Space brings precision to how the images inhabit and activate the space.

The installation’s structural counterpart is Peter Halley’s wall painting, created for his 2024 ‘T’ Space project and continues to be integrated into the architecture. His engineered geometry and synthetic palette stand in measured tension with Wides’s atmospheric, seasonally driven world, sharpening awareness of how perception organizes space and color.

Art historian Elizabeth Ferrer writes: “Susan Wides’s exquisite photographic installation, Peter Halley’s abstract mural project in the space, the views of nature, and the dappled sunlight streaming in all make for an immersive viewing experience that we don’t typically associate with photography.”

Originating in the Catskill Mountain cloves, the works are grounded in a landscape marked by geological continuity and environmental fragility, with water as the central agent of flux, instability, and renewal. “Voice of Silence” draws attention to the perspectives of plants, wind, and water—agents that shape the images as much as the camera does.

Through the interplay of photography, painting, architecture, and the natural environment, “Voice of Silence” crystallizes the concerns at the core of Wides’s practice: perception as embodied, shaped by flux, and responsive to the conditions of light and place.