Davida Kidd: Beautifully Absurd

Davida Kidd is a multi media artist who works and lives in Vancouver BC. She has been trained at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, the University of Alberta and at BCIT. She has taught and lectured at many institutions around the world and is the recipient of numerous grants and awards.

Working primarily with photography as her main media, Davida uses her own fonts and paints the backdrop in her photographs. She does everything: paint the set, design the set, design the font, choose the subject, and print the photo: everything in the image is hers adding her own unique point of view. Davida also does installation and sculpture.

Her current projects include large scale photographs where the subject occupies centre stage and is surrounded by props and scenery. In Core Dump, everything is manipulated and set by Davida. The setting is deliberate; the walls in the background are painted with text and images.

Base Imprints are silver photographs printed on archival paper. In which pieces appear to be missing or suspended in mid-air. Kidd uses dolls and mannequins as her subjects and the overall effect is mysterious and haunting yet humorous and grotesque.
Exquisite Drifting employs the archival metallic paper and features a woman’s headless body juxtaposed with nails, in various poses on a silvery stage set with curtains like clouds.

The images change and morph as we look at them. They have a made up, Felliniesque quality to them. Kidd is interested in depicting the human experience in the urban environment, sexual ambiguity, violence and repressed feelings, which are indicated by the cold windowless rooms in which her photographs are taken. The half human quality of her characters suggested they are in the viewer’s imagination which draws us into the piece as if we have dreamed them. The work seems random when in fact it is deliberated and highly edited.

Davida’s work is both part of the old school with its strict form expectations and the new school of the absurd and rebellious. She expertly juxtaposes the new school’s absurdity and irreverence with the old school’s mandate of photographs based in concrete concepts. These deliberate contrasts are enhanced by the staged room in which the photos are taken: a combination of raw realistic functionality and deliberate creative embellishment.

Davida Kidd's Artist’s Statement:

"The content of my art practice, for years, has addressed themes of domination: the psyche by the dream or ideal, the conscience by guilt, the personality by passion.”
Davida’s work is in private and public collections around the world. www.davidakidd.com

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