Davida Kidd Core Dump Reviewed

Camilla Pickard


 

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 mélange 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). 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 nineteenth 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 graffito-ed 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 aware of Vancouver photo-conceptualism, and deliberately resistant to some of its habits.  There is no interest in the landscape or streetscape as ready-made, no trompe l’oeuil “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. 

 

 

DAVIDA KIDD  Artist Statement

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.

In my work, I create personality “types” which subtly explore the fragility and ferocity of the contemporary human condition. These characters are particular to the urban environment of the west coast of BC where I live. The images are fable-like and involve backgrounds painted in my own illustrative style.

In my most recent work, concrete walls of a small room are covered with dark elements, warnings of a world of transgression, of suppressed violence and sexual ambiguity, aggression and timidity, anxiety and exuberance, resistance and control, playfulness, and ironic humour .The sense of unease in the room is directly related to the unease of the world in which we live, where unpredictable violence is never far away. 

The characters I create appear to be dredged up from the darker recesses of the subconscious. 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 sometimes employ, where real and unreal are seamlessly blended, act as a metaphor for the complex ambiguities surrounding our choices, particularly in this new digital age, where new strains have been put on the human psyche. 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.

Before I vacated the space that I painted, I decided to document its destruction and erasure. I invited the people that I previously choreographed in front of my camera, to express themselves and take part in the “wiping out” of what was there.

 

 

Davida Kidd   received her M.V.A. in Print Media from the University of Alberta. She is currently an instructor in Print Media for the Visual Arts Department at the University College of the Fraser Valley in Abbottsford, BC CANADA.

Her current body of work “Core Dump” was recently reviewed in the Spring 2007 issues of Canadian Art Magazine and Border Crossings Magazine of the Arts.

Upcoming exhibitions include- The 34th SIGGRAPH International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Technologies, San Diego Convention Centre California, Contemporary Print Exhibition/ Conference Falun Triennial 2007 Falun, Sweden, Gallery at Dalarnas Museum, Print Tokyo 2007, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum Japan 5th and Novosibirsk Graphic Art Biennial, Russia.

 

Camilla Pickard is a Vancouver writer and teacher. She works in the Critical and Cultural Studies department at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design.

Her poetry has appeared in various Canadian journals including West Coast Line and The Capilano Review. Recent publications include the catalogue essay "Finding Herself: New Works by Carrie Walker" for Kristi Engle Gallery in LA, and articles on Wreck Beach and classical and experimental music for the new Time Out city guide to Vancouver.

 


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