Candice Breitz

Cinematic stardom, cultural diffusion, and the need for approval collide in Candice Breitz’s exhibition “The Woods.” Three video installations depict actors from three epicenters of contemporary cinematic production: Hollywood, Bollywood, and Nollywood, located in California, India, and Nigeria, respectively. One installation, The Audition (all works 2012), depicts twenty-five American children, who are struggling for a persona, as they are informed by authoritarian entertainment industry professionals that they lack charisma and optimism. In this metadiegetic audition, shown on six vertical

View of “Excerpts from Silver Meadow,” 2014.

picks September 15, 2014

Todd Hido

Todd Hido’s current exhibition, “Excerpts from Silver Meadow,” pursues a disjointed narrative about midwestern suburbia in the 1960s and ’70s. From the puzzle pieces—nearly one hundred photographs, pulp novels, and ephemera—we discover an anxiously normal boy with a dark side. The uneven sizing and hanging of the images augment this collage effect, with the works by turns manifesting fear, banality, and lust. Many of the blurred landscapes taken from inside a car bleakly outline a particular upbringing—Hido’s own. In fact, the show as a whole productively commingles the tale of a fictionalized