Davida Kidd
"Davida Kidd" by Robin Laurence, Winter 2006, p. 79
Two years ago, Davida Kidd gained access to a basement storage room in downtown Vancouver. Located in what had been an acclaimed mid-century modernist office building (converted in the past decade to condominiums), the room offered its metal doors and concrete walls as a kind of tabula rasa. (It also offered its history as a register of shifting socioeconomic and architectural realities.) Kidd saw the room as an opportunity to engage her hand and take a break from the computer-manipulated photographs and prints that had become the hallmark of her practice. At least that’s what she did initially.
Painting images and text directly onto the walls of the room, improvising as she went, Kidd deployed a form of cartooning and caricature recalled from her youth. She also quoted a range of typographical styles in a manner that melded graffiti, retro signage, artspeak and automatic writing. Words and images, complemented and complicated by altered found objects, unconsciously delivered an examination of feminine stereotypes, academic hierarchies, artworld exclusions—and computer culture. (The title of the project, Core Dump, is a techie term having to do with information at the core of the computer.) Anxieties, grievances and satirical energy surged from her paintbrush.
After a private exhibition of the basement room as site-specific installation, Kidd progressed to another phase of the project. She used it as a set for a series of staged colour photographs, employing friends, neighbours and colleagues as models. A little girl poses in a T-shirt, tights and tutu in front of painted images of pink-hued femininity; an Outsider artist kicks himself in the bum in the context of cultural tribalism; a young man with a big bundle slung over his shoulder waves in the midst of a dream world of dollhouses, reflecting pools, exposed pipes and distorted perspectives. All convey an oxymoronic melding of impulses. In some instances, they also represent Kidd’s cyclical return to computer-mediated imagery.
With this work, Kidd situates herself between Vancouver’s older generation of photo-based artists (with visual quotes from Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham) and a younger generation of artists whose practices are founded in intentionally crude and cartoon- like drawing. She juxtaposes the latter’s spontaneity, absurdity and surreality with the former’s embrace of concept-driven art-making. These contrasts are enhanced by the altered room in which the photos are taken: a combination of raw functionality and creative embellishment. It’s a wondrous adventure—and still evolving.
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