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DAVIDA KIDD |
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| Core Dump A windowless basement room: a fallout shelter-cum-girls’ club: a surreal enjambment of objects and images that mine the subconscious for its caches of nostalgia and dread: this space, at once cosy and eerie, forms the setting for the complex photographic portraits in Davida Kidd’s Core Dump. Over the span of two years, Kidd decorated her studio in the basement of the Electra Building with a painted collage that merges historic and contemporary references with the “detritus of Shangri-La” – an uncanny melange of doll’s houses, comic strips, fairy tales and frightening toys. The texts and images that fill the studio walls were collected, painted, or drawn by Kidd, meticulously arranged using digital scans and traditional collage methods, and then writ large in water-soluble paint. (The final stage of the project, the destruction of the murals, will be documented on video and shown as part of her upcoming show in Krakow.) The witty, sometimes savage tone of her drawings suggests the darkly humorous comics of Aline Kominsky-Crumb, although Kidd renders with an elegant, delicate line that is reminiscent of 19th century caricature and children’s book illustration. Within the room, a variety of objects, skewed by Kidd’s playful interventions, conflate childhood and adult associations to visceral effect. A toy van, painted flat grey, spills a trail of needles from its back door. A sexy pair of women’s boots, their toes cut off, has been filled with pink gumballs, masses of chewed gum protruding from the openings where the toes should be. This is the basement of our dreams and nightmares, a weird set within which her subjects pose for idiosyncratic portraits that are both intimate and theatrical. Uncanny doubles abound. In one image, a girl is piled on a small table together with old evening gowns, Chinese brocade, and antique toys; the face of the doll at the top of the pile exactly mirrors her own expression. In another, outsider artist Mad Dog aims a kick at his doppelganger (or is it the other way around?) in a sly nod to Rodney Graham’s City Self, Country Self; here, though, the action is frozen, an incomplete gesture rather than an endless repetition. And, as in an expressionist film, Kidd’s subjects are haunted by their own looming shadows. The texts on the walls offer ambivalent commentary: the dreaming girl is surmounted by the words “Pedigree” and “Victory” (ironically placed on the stump of a dead tree); elsewhere in the room, “Baudelaireian Flaneur“ jostles up against the sales pitch of “Best Subversion, Best Coercion” and the childish insult “Paulina PhD is a Wing Girl”. This is cultural theory as tag or slogan, an excited display of allegiance or identity on the level of the graffiti’d taunt. Theory and academy are registered as a pressure to conform, and this pressure sparks an explosive response from Kidd. Kidd’s photographs reveal that she is both acutely cognisant of Vancouver photoconceptualism, and deliberately resistant to some of its habits. There is no interest in the landscape or streetscape as ready-made, no trompe l’oiel “documentary” that is staged to look spontaneous: the world of Core Dump is both intensively interior and self-consciously theatrical, at once more and less real than the flaneurist works of Jeff Wall or Roy Arden. It is also assertively feminine and even romantic in character, forsaking notions of the artless, the ugly and the ordinary in favour of a complex exploration of feminine identity (and alterity) that draws together expressions of anxiety, aggression and threat with an ambivalent emphasis on delicacy and beauty. This philosophy extends into form: Kidd’s photographs, dominated by the soft grey of the studio walls, are printed on metallic silver paper, imparting a rich patina and a delicate luminosity to the colours. The feel is evocative of silver gelatin prints and hand-tinted photos, historic and aesthetically sumptuous. In Core Dump, Davida Kidd turns herself – and us – inside out. The interior – memory, feeling, dream – becomes exteriorized through images that evoke the fears and fantasies, drives and desires of childhood and adolescence. Her photographs remind us that we don’t, and can’t, know or own ourselves completely: we ourselves are the frightening thing that looms shadowlike on the walls around us.
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Base Imprints The content of my artistic practice, for years, has addressed themes of domination: the psyche by the dream or ideal, the conscience by guilt, the personality by passion. "Base Imprints" consists of digitally composite “types” which subtly explore impressions of the fragility and ferocity of pre-pubescence. There is an experimental measure of violence and perversity in childhood play that is part and parcel of developing a conscience. However, guidelines for behavior are more and more individualized or subject to change in the confusing societal stew that we live in today. We are smothered in endless waves of information, peppered with an expanding array of cross cultural references and continually visible alternative lifestyles. A new term has been repeatedly heard here in the media of late: teenage "swarming". Loosely organized gangs of teenagers, boys and/or girls partake in brutal assaults on individuals without any obvious apparent motive. These kinds of reports conjure up the horrific imagery from the novel "Lord of the Flies", William Golding's fictitious account of savage anarchy, abuse of power and fear of the unknown, causing a group of ship-wrecked children to spiral into a barbaric existence. It is no coincidence that “Sissy Fight”; a nasty and addictive game based on the viciousness of schoolyard play, in recent years, became one of the Internets biggest crazes for adults as well as children. One can enter as cartoon schoolgirl, and torture one’s opponent until they suffer a crisis of self-esteem and leave the playground! The characters I create are composites of human parts found and made, my own photography and drawing, bits from my memory and eclectic collection of ephemera. I have invented subtle "types" that have characteristics that we all might vividly remember; the domineering leader, the charming bad boy, the sensitive androgynous target, the internally tortured bully. Some things in our faced paced world never change, such as the challenges of peer pressure. However, coping mechanisms do. By splicing bits of fiction together I encourage story telling and the exercising of imagination in the viewer. The sleek compositing effects of the computer that I employ, where real and unreal are seamlessly blended, begin to reflect the ambiguities of life in our digital age. The intrinsic nature of the photograph, in spite of its questionable verisimilitude, still lends a kind of veneer of "truth". I count on this seductive quality to draw the viewer in. I believe that more than ever we are excepting our vicarious experiences with film, gaming, television and the Internet as experienced lived. Digital wizards are now creating computer screen "faces" that can read and mimic facial expressions. We are all dealing with new strains that have been put on the human psyche. Trying to cope with the rapid changes of living in this technological era is resulting in shared common experiences happening vicariously through a variety of screens. Entities that are created through the culture of the computer are taking on a whole new meaning as "real" and "imaginary" step onto the same plane. |