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News __________________________________________________________________ Review - Canadian Art Magazine - Winter 2006 (pdf format) __________________________________________________________________ Review - Border Crossings 2006 (pdf format) __________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________ Review - Galleries West Magazine Fall 2005 (pdf format) __________________________________________________________________ Review - Visual Arts - The Drawing Room - July 28, 2005 (jpg format) __________________________________________________________________ Review of Exhibition at Platform by Winnepeg Free Press, March 31, 2005 (pdf format) __________________________________________________________________ Jan. 27, 2005. 01:00 AM PETER GODDARD Long before Chucky popped up in Child's Play in 1988, the menacing child figure had crept through all levels of culture. It was repellent and appealing in equal measure, no doubt because we all knew someone just like it when we were kids. For the visual artist, there are few better buttons to push than the image of the physically/psychologically/sexually twisted child such as any one of Hans Bellmer's poupées, or "articulated minors" as the German artist liked to describe them. In fact, the tradition remains alive and mutant in the Tragic Anatomies (1996) from award-winning contemporary British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman, where doll-like teens, wearing only Nikes, have their genitalia popping out of the smooth surfaces of their bodies in all sort of unlikely places. Such shock tactics — shtick tactics when it comes to the Chapmans — are only the beginning of Davida Kidd's game in "Davida Kidd: Base Imprints" at Lehmann Leskiw + Schedler Fine Art. The Vancouver-based painter/photographer goes further by creating her "ambiguous narratives," as she calls them, to drag us into the psychic space where the mutant child lives. It's awesome, I tell you. Kidd's God Save Us from Intoxicating Glances (2004) draws a cave arranged like a stage set. The artist — or a figure substituting for the artist as well as for the viewer — stands partially submerged in what would appear to be liquid lead, watching an array of designer stalactites, cone-shaped to perfection, float overhead, each glowing a warm red. Here, Kidd's' mysterious, perhaps inexplicable narrative is frozen like one scene of an opera stopped in place forever. "Base Imprints" does have its own, simpler Bride of Chucky moment with one diptych, where a cheeky, grinning Barbie, her eyes closed, holds a nasty looking little sock puppet in her left hand. In her right, there's a plastic bag containing three dolls' heads ripped from their original plastic bodies. In the left panel, a posse of evil-looking sock puppets wait silently for someone to animate their evil ways. As far as it goes, this works for anyone looking for just cheap thrills and would understand immediately the message sent by a morbid sock puppet. But Kidd, who talks of the "themes of domination," knowingly uses our deep understanding of the twisted child figure to drag us into her manipulation of its psychic landscape. It's somewhat familiar territory, too. Think of L. Frank Baum's Oz, but with an infinity of greys instead of emerald green. Here, the Wizard is Carl Jung, the Tin Man has seen one Arnold Schwarzenegger movie too many, and the artist takes on the role of the film director. Instead of a camera though, Kidd uses a dazzling array of photo-etching Photoshop computer tweaking techniques, where historical imagery is blended into with new photography and painting. In fact, Kidd rescues the Tin Man from his teary eyed Wizard of Oz appearance, where one of the coolest images in all of filmmaking emerges, particularly when he starts blathering away about having a heart, as a bit of a dink. With her work Inside My Pillow Case (2003), Kidd retools the famous Tin Man image. It now has dignity and menace, a messenger from authoritarians. On the far right of the montage, the figure seemingly interrogates a young man. The Tin Man is also shown rushing, weightless, through an empty central space, toward the image of a face that's part death mask, part orgiastic, but as ravaged looking as the face of a moon. Here's a dream sequence at the point of becoming nightmarish. But it's the in-betweens of it all that matter. Feeling is held in suspended animation. Distorted dream sequences are, of course, the lifeblood of Surrealism, an idea being given a new twist these days in various forms. Neo Rauch, the emerging German art star, uses imagery from the former East Germany as his point of departure. Kidd works with her dreams and a lot of old snaps, resources surely as rich for mining as old Communist propaganda. Threaded through Kidd's work are drawings, and sculpture by Drew Shaffer, fluffy-minded but coolly funny things for the most part which would have been far better served had they been shown on their own. Speaking of morphing. The Metamorphosis Festival — yes, the "morpho" part for unknown reasons is set in italics — got its kick-off yesterday at the Art Gallery of Ontario to give some sense of what shape the shapelessness-seeking festival will take as it continues through to June. Stay tuned. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ __________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________ Davida Kidd at the INTUIT Art Fair in Chicago October 1-3 2004 __________________________________________________________________ 13th Tallinn Print Triennial 10 September - 31 October 2004 __________________________________________________________________
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