"Susan Wides invites us to come alive to vision as a kind of inventiveness, an integrative faculty that, moment by moment, connects us to our surroundings and, ultimately, to one another."
Carter Ratcliff
Susan Wides: Seeing Seen


VOICE OF SILENCE Solo exhibition at Private Public Gallery. September 28 - November 2, 2024. Hudson, NY.

CHRONOGRAM Voice of Silence: Photography by Susan Wides at Private Public Gallery in Hudson, October 9, 2024. By Taliesin Thomas

UPSTATE DIARY Susan Wides: Voice of Silence. Private Public Gallery Hudson, NY October 2, 2024. By David Ebony

THE HUDSON RIVER MUSEUM: Rivers Flow | Artists Connect. February 2 – September 1, 2024. Yonkers, NY.
Curated by Jennifer McGregor and Laura Vookles

To view more images from a body of work, please contact the studio.

Waxworld (1983-1990) uses the question of where reality ends and illusion begins—a subject inherent in waxwork displays—as a starting point for exploring human interactions in both public and private spheres. In photographing these uncanny and claustrophobic displays, packed with the iconography of a popular culture fascinated with its own decline, I saw an unsettling spectacle of myth, history, and recent headlines. As relics of a time past, the wax figures also seemed to reflect a forceful refusal of death, a quality shared with photography.

The series is, in part, a response to these often misogynist distortions—a refictionalizing of the subjects that removes them yet further from their origins. In doing so, I create new visual artifacts, producing worlds for the viewer to sort out.