- Contributor
Description -
Canadian Davida Kidd brings a selection of her captivating photographic and multi-media work for the first time solo show in Shanghai. Often associated with some of the “Vancouver school” of photographers, including art stars Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, Roy Arden, and Ken Lum, Davida Kidd’s original and exquisite works cover universal issues found in the human condition: the psyche by the dream or ideal, the conscience by guilt, the personality by passion. Her complex, vibrant yet often delicate works contain darker elements, warnings of a world of transgression, of suppressed violence and sexual ambiguity, aggression and timidity, anxiety and exuberance, resistance and control, playfulness, cross cultural tensions and ironic humour. This is a very special opportunity to see work of the kind rarely seen in mainland China.
- City Weekend
says -
From the famous "Vancouver school" of photographers, internationally acclaimed Canadian artist Davida Kidd shares her work from the Core Dump series in this solo exhibition. Kidd's illustrate issues like the psyche by the dream and the conscience by guilt, yet her complex works also contain darker elements like violence, aggression and ironic humor.
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People as Props
Director and curator of contemporary art gallery Art Labor, Martin Kemble, brings a collection of selected works by Canadian art star Davida Kidd. The majority of the pieces on display originated as part of a project she conducted between 2006 and 2008, entitled CORE DUMP (a nostalgic, computer hacker slang term synonymous with "memory dump").
The first phase of CORE DUMP (2006-2008) features Kidd's handpainted "dumping" of her own images and typography onto the dank, basement walls of the Electra Building in downtown Vancouver. For the second phase, Kidd photographed staged scenes of fellow artists reacting to and interacting with her walls. Often, having many details of an artist’s processes, however intriguing, can distance the viewer from the works. It is images such as those in phase two that perhaps lead visitors to believe that they, too, are props to Kidd's artwork.
Kidd weaves these deliberate (sometimes solemn, sometimes dramatic) poses together with her neo graffiti-style, water-based murals. The result is unique, nostalgic layering of 19th century caricature illustration, 3D references to the murals and seamless photoshop manipulation. And finally, the mixed media on the various vintage suitcases served as inclusive thematic threads inviting me into the world of those since-cleaned basement walls. Overall, these works play with the lines between dimension, perception, theater and reality.
Additional photographic prints showcase Kidd's great stylistic versatility. Such is shown in The Safety of Small Things, 2007, a portrait of a giant porcelain doll in a puffy doily dress, floating in a stream over torpedo-shaped fish – two tiny doll houses perch on the sea-rocks behind her. This show, a mixture of collage, painting, photography and typography, envelops the viewer in dashes of dreaminess and a playful pinch of dark humor.
--Renee Reynolds, Issue 11, Art Review