Meulensteen is pleased to announce the opening of Tim Hyde’s The Island: Prologue on February 23rd in the Project Space. The installation presents photographs, drawings and text as an overture to a body of work that the artist is developing for his forthcoming major exhibition at Meulensteen in 2013.

The series begins with a story about a small island in the Pacific Ocean. The island was the site of a shipwreck in the 1950s that set off a series of geopolitical disputes. These conflicts, combined with the cultural shifts of the early twentieth century, resulted in human evacuation and subsequent replacement by large colonies of sea mammals. The animals have since moved into a house abandoned by the island’s former human inhabitants and established their own strict social order within the ruins. Sea lions, who have articulated limbs, maneuver up and down stairs and have therefore commandeered the upper floors. Seals are left to fight over the crowded first floor. Giant sea birds fly in to occupy the attic. The only human presence on the island for more than two decades has been that of a solitary government ranger, whom Hyde photographed on the last day of his assignment there.

As a site where apparent failures have become a generative force to yield unexpected successes, Hyde uses the island as a case study in which to activate relationships between time, architecture, and the expanded field of photography.

Tim Hyde’s work has most recently been included in exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (solo), Philadelphia, PA; Ar/ge Kunst Galerie Museum, Bolzano, Italy; Instituzione del Comune di Scandici, Florence, Italy; the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; and The Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY. Forthcoming exhibitions include The Invention of Island Time (solo), in Santiago, Chile; and Placemakers, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, Nebraska. Hyde received a BA from Vassar College, an MFA from Columbia University, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007.

The artist currently lives and works in New York.