Susan Wides, known locally for her savvy and beautiful revisitings of classic Hudson River School landscapes (as well as some of the best art parties of recent years at her home near the Catskill/Saugerties border), is opening a new exhibit of large-format photographs at the Chelsea gallery in New York that’s been making her career. She described the new material, collectively titled “Art & Entertainment” and representing her first foray into full digital work, her best ever.

You’ve seen her work locally at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, as well as the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, which gave her a solo exhibition a few years back. Her style’s inimitable…once one’s seen the world through Wides’ eyes, especially the wonders that are her first home in Manhattan, one can never see quite the same way again.

Wides is a master if the shift and tilt functions on a camera. She works with happenstance, but also an amazing sense of care that allows all the blurs and sharp focuses of her works, best seen in large gallery prints, to take on a life of their own and, more importantly, pull together to create a sense of a somewhat off-kilter, almost faked world. Call it a kid’s perspective of adult realms.

In her latest series, Wides freed herself from the bulk of her tripoded 4x5 view camera to a more portable digital tool, freeing herself up to new imagery. What results are views of the Toys R Us store in Times Square, the Guggenheim, Central Park, and other Manhattan icons captured as if for the first time.

No wonder her work is in such demand from top magazines and other publishers… and set for a restrospective at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers next summer.

“Art & Entertainment” opens with a 6 p.m.-8 p.m. Saturday, May 1 reception at Kim Foster Gallery, 529 West 20 Street in New York, and then stays up through June 5.

For further information call 212-229-0044 or visit www.kimfostergallery.com.

Talk about local artists changing the ways in which we all see… as all art is inevitably destined to do.++