EXHIBIT REVIEW: City Lights for Oct. 31-Nov.6 : Timothy Hyde at Multiple Exposures Gallery
For his exhibition Book of Job, photographer Timothy Hyde has combined three threads of his prior work—nighttime images, post-disaster photography, and sites of neighbor-on-neighbor violence—into one. The notion of tying these tropes together is promising, but ultimately unnecessary, because the images are moving enough on their own. The disaster images include a room in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with its walls covered with flood residue, and a location in Indiana where a family of five died in a tornado, marked by stuffed animals. The places of sublimated violence are even more disturbing. They include a rural corner of Arkansas where Black residents were massacred in 1919; a stately courtyard in Trieste—Italy’s only Nazi concentration camp with a crematorium; and a Toys “R” Us-style children’s store visible in Ukraine only because Russian shelling knocked down an entire building between it and where Hyde was photographing. The thorniest images are those that document the horrors of the Balkans: a Nazi-era Croatian extermination camp where Serbs were victimized—still standing decades after the war; a salmon-colored train station in Croatia pockmarked 28 years after being shelled by Serbs in 1991; and a cultural center in Bosnia where more than 500 Muslim men and boys were executed. These places may be empty today, but they reek of stolen humanity, and it’s impossible to ignore the relentless cycle of brutality.
Timothy Hyde’s Book of Job runs through Nov. 17 at Multiple Exposures Gallery at the Torpedo Factory Art Center, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. Daily, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. multipleexposuresgallery.com. Free. —Louis Jacobson