INTERVIEW: A Conversation with Jeremy Kidd

Please enjoy this interview, conducted via email, with Jeremy Kidd, whose show at Leslie Sacks Contemporary was reviewed here.  The artist's website can be found here.

I On the Arts:  When did you start making art?  What's your art background?

Jeremy Kidd:  I started very young, [sic] there are 17 artists in my family going back to Sir William Nicholson who was a wonderful landscape and portrait artist who painted amongst many, Queen Victoria.  Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson are even more notable relatives (Grand Parents) [sic].  So therefore I was surrounded by art and was encouraged by my mother also.

IOtA:  What drew you to photography?  What other media do you use?  What kind of camera do you use?

JK:  I've used many media over the years. I trained originally as a sculptor. I have used trees, cars steel, plastic, plaster, concrete, resin, cloth, sand, bricks etc.  I've painted in most mediums made installation a little video and I had a work on a billboard recently.  Photography was an early part of recording the sculptures I made I was also attracted to taking black and white shots of landscapes.  I use a 5D MK 2 and mostly a 17mil lens[.]

IOtA:  What inspired the creative techniques used in this show?  It really looks different from any other photography show I've seen.

Desert to Palm (2004) 

(Image provided by the artist.)

JK: This was the 1st piece in the “Fictional Reality” series and was catalyzed by a show at Cirrus Gallery Los Angeles called “Crazy thoughts have quick wings”. Here the brief was to illustrate the poem “Ariel” by Silvia Plath. When I was heading out to the desert and was impressed with drama and scale of the landscape and felt it related well to the poem [sic].

I found an old armchair perched atop a dusty mountain in Desert Hot Springs. From there I surveyed the landscape as I looked a cross [sic] to Palm Springs and was struck by the prospect of trying to re-create the grand unfolding landscape with the inadequacies of a single photograph. It seemed quit[e] obvious that I was going to have to use multiple shots to try and convey this scene in sight and sense. This I had done in the early eighties while at art school when we had been given the brief to photographically record a walk in a park. I too was aware of Hockney's wonderful pieces and was compelled to move a step further from those works by choosing to painstakingly blend and meld together many of the shots onto a panoramic work.

From left to right: The piece features a midnight scene with Jupiter just above the moon. The central area is at sunset and to the right is midday. I had return to the armchair 3 times and shoot panoramically. There is a car central to the piece that streaks from night to day and a soccer pitch that is a day scene set within the night.

IOtA:  What's the technical process like of creating these photo collages/montages?

JK:  I usually shoot for week [sic] returning to the same scene at different times of day to experience a range of lighting conditions and weather shifts. I continue to work on the reassembling of the many shots in Photoshop for up to 4 months though I spent a year on “Time Square 1” [sic] (2007).  There were in total 750 layers in Photoshop when complete. I consider myself a painter, painting in pixels. The actions and techniques require all the same perceptive skills and abilities that conventional painting requires. Fundamentally, compositing up to 100 long exposures into a single piece is a more cohesive way of expressing the filmic. It allows me to explore movement and condensed time and lends itself to my concerns with exemplifying the transcendental and the essence of place, in the urban/landscape. “It seems unrealistic to expect a single photographic shot, a single moment in time, to convey the human experience of seeing. We visually explore our environment in the third and forth dimensions as we build our personal visual journey.”

Time Square 1 (2004) [sic]

(Image provided by the artist.)

IOtA:  What do you hope people take away from this show?

JK:  A palpable, visceral sense of the place I visited and photographed.  

This Body of Work Seeks To:

1. Explore transcendental qualities in the urban landscape. Achieving this through idealized arrangements of architecture, light and space[.]

2. Introduce the notion of subjective memory in photography, by altering the image from its original source.

3. Filmily express the notion of condensed time, through multiple long exposures and different POVS contained in a single piece.

4. Explore and convey the sculptural confined within the 2 dimensional plane in photography[.]

Please check out the new mini documentary about the show by Eric Mihn:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ85-yMdiRQ

IOtA: Thank you very much!