Twilight is the most theatrical hour, and someone has staged a small drama in it: a young woman in a dark velvet coat sits on a low rock in the scrub, the last blue draining from the sky behind her. Her eye make-up has run, there is a raw scrape on her knee, and her tights are pushed down around her ankles. You register the narrative before you can stop yourself, then realize you have been handed no narrative at all — only its aftermath, or its rehearsal.
This belongs to the work Hido keeps under the heading Unpublished, and the loose, cinematic ambiguity is the point. It could be a fashion outtake, a film still with no film attached, a scene of harm or of play-acting harm. The picture, an archival pigment print on Dibond, declines to say, and that refusal is what keeps you circling it, faintly uneasy, faintly complicit.
What Hido understands — and what lifts the image above its lurid ingredients — is that the deep dusk does half the storytelling. The blue is genuinely beautiful, indifferent to the figure it surrounds, and the tension between that serene sky and the disheveled woman beneath it is where the disquiet lives. He gives you a heroine and withholds her story, leaving you alone with the light and your own uncomfortable curiosity.
Twilight is the most theatrical hour, and someone has staged a small drama in it: a young woman in a dark velvet coat sits on a low rock in the scrub, the last blue draining from the sky behind her. Her eye make-up has run, there is a raw scrape on her knee, and her tights are pushed down around her ankles. You register the narrative before you can stop yourself, then realize you have been handed no narrative at all — only its aftermath, or its rehearsal.
This belongs to the work Hido keeps under the heading Unpublished, and the loose, cinematic ambiguity is the point. It could be a fashion outtake, a film still with no film attached, a scene of harm or of play-acting harm. The picture, an archival pigment print on Dibond, declines to say, and that refusal is what keeps you circling it, faintly uneasy, faintly complicit.
What Hido understands — and what lifts the image above its lurid ingredients — is that the deep dusk does half the storytelling. The blue is genuinely beautiful, indifferent to the figure it surrounds, and the tension between that serene sky and the disheveled woman beneath it is where the disquiet lives. He gives you a heroine and withholds her story, leaving you alone with the light and your own uncomfortable curiosity.