Davida Kidd

Much of Davida Kidd’s interdisciplinary career has been driven by intuition rather than theory, by her outsider-art sensibilities rather than postmodern strategies. Which is to say that her work doesn’t look like Vancouver’s predominant school of photo-based and media art. Instead of focusing on conditions of urban life and the built environment, Kidd has depicted interior landscapes, where psychological rather than sociological conditions of alienation, domination and disjunction prevail. Her often surreal images create a dramatic tension between illusion and actuality, between the dark depths of the unconscious mind and the scintillating surface of daily life.

Kidd’s recent (and ongoing) project, “Core Dump,” brings together a stream-of-consciousness crowd of images and text in the form of a mixed-media installation and a subsequent series of large-scale colour photographs staged within that altered space. Although not a primary consideration, architecture can be seen as a subtextual reference here, since the triggering element of “Core Dump” was Kidd’s access to a basement room in a landmark modernist building in downtown Vancouver. (That structure, the former BC Hydro building, was converted in the last decade to high-end condominiums— a process that could be the subject of a lengthy disquisition on shifting techno-economic conditions and the disappearance of the traditional workplace.) The intervention Kidd made in that subterranean space also resonated effectively with her ongoing references to the below-conscious machinations of the human mind.

Working by hand—with pencil and paintbrush and without any theoretical scaffolding or conscious agenda—was a function of Kidd’s desire to take a break from her computer. An accomplished photographer and printmaker with a lengthy CV (including a list of gold, silver and bronze medals awarded at international photo salons and print biennials from Seoul, to New York, to Linz), Kidd for years had been employing digital technologies to shape and compose her images, and to enhance their sense of interiority. Her installation, however, returned her to a place of handmade-ness and to a satirical drawing style she had not used since her youth. The surreal inwardness remained.

At the same time, Kidd’s images continued to address aspects of our digitalized existence. The title of the project, “Core Dump,” is hacker slang for what occurs when a computer program is aborted. Throughout a previous series of photographs, and on into this project, Kidd has been preoccupied with the increasing integration of computer technologies into our daily lives. Here, however, the computer becomes a more neutral metaphor for the mind and its store of memories.

Although Kidd’s installation, which included altered found objects ranging from doll houses to old luggage, initially resisted the long reach of technology, she returned to both camera and computer to mediate her imagery as the project progressed into its next phase. The oppressive, windowless room with its fluorescent lighting and Cindercrete walls, along with the intervening words and pictures, became an elaborate set for a series of staged photographs, introducing a significant element of theatre into her project. Rather than directing professional models to assume fixed roles, she intentionally involved friends, neighbours and acquaintances, whose costumes, poses and facial expressions revealed significant aspects of improvisation and collaboration. Kidd was interested in their unpremeditated interactions with the environment she had created. Again, her intuition led her to trust theirs—to believe that what they did with the material at hand would help her realize an eloquent series of images.

Elements of weirdness, subtle horror and grotesquerie have long characterized Kidd’s work. These same elements could be seen not so much in her photographs as in the original components of her installation. Some of the characters she depicted were hideous, others hapless. Many sported big heads, small bodies and elaborately sculpted coiffures, the latter conveying elements of both fetishism and extreme control. The text deployed here included individual words and phrases drawn from computer lingo, cultural theory, feminist theory, artspeak, found poetry and fairy tales. These elements, rendered in a panoply of graphic styles that called up everything from graffiti, to Victorian calligraphy, to mid-20th-century signage, created again the sense of a stream-of-consciousness response to contemporary life. Childhood memories, the frantic pressures of the adult everyday, and the superego interjections of computer culture and critical discourse all became inextricably linked.

In the photos, the models establish allegorical and sometimes surreal relationships with their surroundings, like characters in a Giorgio de Chirico painting. A mysterious narrative is suggested and references occur to both historical and contemporary art, with very particular allusions to the power and influence of the Vancouver School. Lord of Strathcona (After Rodney Graham), for instance, depicts a character kicking himself in the bum (a direct homage to Graham’s City Self/Country Self) in front of a wall painted with the words “TRIBE,” “Flaneur” and “Best.” Large three-dimensional letters spelling out “A-R-T” sit on the floor behind the twinned figures. One aspect of the long-haired, tattooed blond man getting and giving the boot is that of hapless outsider; the other, arrogant insider. Yet the power relationship is reversible. Although functioning outside the art fraternity, the seemingly vulnerable, bare-chested fellow is more attuned to the beauty and complexity of his world than the arrogant ass doing the kicking.

There’s a strong autobiographical element in some of the work, Kidd has said concerning her own struggle to resist familial, social and cultural pressures and find her authentic voice. Many of the images in both her installation and her subsequent photographs juggle ideas of creativity, femininity and feminism, attempting to find some place of purchase in a jagged landscape of gender stereotypes, sexual politics and personal aspiration.

Other photos in the series examine other stereotypes (including those based on notions of race and culture) and social expectations. They also grapple with issues of communication in the digital age. In Avatar, for instance, a costumed young woman stands stiffly in front of a damaged metal door, above and on which are painted the words “Poser,” “Log-On” and “Despot.” A cartoon woman’s face is also depicted, with the word “Google” etched across her forehead. The model’s eyes are closed and her arms are pressed flat to her side, as she undergoes a storm of “emoticons.” These email abbreviations are isolated and enlarged on pieces of white paper, which seem to fall on her from some source outside the frame and suggest that written language is retreating to its ancient origins in glyphs and pictographs.

While Kidd’s previous work and her hand-painted installation situate her alongside a younger generation of artists who base their drawings, paintings and sculpture on bursts of intuition and 21stcentury automatism, her recent photographic tableaux nudge her up against an older generation of theory-based and photo-based art. It’s not a new situation for her: She has long played the Apollonian against the Dionysian in her art, the conscious against the unconscious, the academy against the outsider. It’s as if she were balancing on one leg, paintbrush in one hand, camera in the other, bare toes of her raised foot operating a computer. This is not an easy posture to maintain—but Kidd has done it for years. ■

“Davida Kidd: Core Dump” was exhibited at the Bjornson Kajawara Gallery in Vancouver from June 1 to 24, 2006. It then travelled to the International Cultural Centre in Crakow, Poland, and the Art New Media Gallery in Warsaw.

Robin Laurence is a writer, curator and a contributing editor to Border Crossings from Vancouver.