After months of a solo road-trip in 2019 exploring US motels, the artist presents b/w & color photographs (with a diary/book) of his performative installations captured during his stays. All are formally composed with feats of execution.

Elijah Wheat Showroom is delighted to present The Road Home, a photography exhibition by Alex Yudzon.  Creating autonomous photographs from site specific installations and studio-based still lifes, Yudzon’s work draws attention to the way we construct personal space within the context of the modern world. The series of photographs comprising: The Road Home, contemplates America’s “complex relationship to the hotel as a temporary space; a home, a shelter, a safe harbor, an option of last resort, a place to die or disappear, a stepping stone to a better life or a desperate escape from an old one” Yudzon explains.

When Yudzon received a NYFA grant in photography in 2019, he took to the road alone in order to experience, rearrange, catalogue and document unique independently owned hotels, their keepers and their rooms within. Aiming to shoot at least one hotel in all of the 50 contiguous United States, he has curated a collection that exemplifies his creatively disassembled, reassembled, balanced, disheveled, and totem-like monuments to the spaces. He states: “I work while I travel, moving from state to state, room to room, creating a haunting portrait of American hotel rooms and my interventions within them. Each photograph depicts the process of finding and losing a home. Each installation activates the history of hidden activity of all the people that came before me, their dreams, passions, and collective energy.” There is no personal ephemera in the shots, only objects from the rented room.

Hotels reflect the culture of the community they’re based. They represent so much of what we find appealing and disturbing about this country. “They are at once a destination for romance, adventure and self discovery while simultaneously a liminal space for criminal activity, poverty and social isolation.” Yudzon reflects and then asks:

What gives the hotel the freedom to be anything and everything, to evoke such a richness of content? Perhaps, it is the fact that hotels are a home away from home, they provide privacy and anonymity in a world where both are increasingly hard to come by. There is great comfort in the knowledge that all evidence of one's presence will be completely erased upon one's absence. These two factors, presence without permanence, shelter without ownership, protect us from the consequences of daily life and loosens the binds of our imagination allowing for a rich and diverse history of use.

Yudzon shot thousands of images and visited dozens of hotels. Currently in production, a book will showcase more of the imagery adding to Yudzon’s immersive installations and the history of the fading non-corporate American Hotel. His work has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally including Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, China International Photography Biennial and the Arles Photo Festival. This solo exhibition will run in our Newburgh location through May 30, 2021 by appointment only.