DAVIDA KIDD

Here are some of my thoughts on the topic of exile and some of the questions I chose to address.

1.Why an artist should tackle with the topic of exile?
2.Do you have any personal experience of exile?
3.Is it necessary to leave one’s country to experience being in exile?
4.Communication
5.My own work. And thoughts surrounding "illusion" and "reality"

This theme of exile is a bold one as it indirectly addresses the issue of how
extreme differences in the experience of everyday reality throughout the world inevitably affect the way art is understood and produced. This is a challenge the growing proliferation of international art exhibitions, of all kinds, face in terms of curation.

Throughout history I suppose that the term exile has meant some kind of rupture or separation.
In light of this, within the phenomena of rapid globalization, artists today can be at home everywhere and at the same time nowhere, far and close from everything.
Different forms of exile can became a theme of one’s work or it can actually become a liberation from having to define one’s self by one’s geographic location, in spite of the fact that there will be obvious traces.
Where does one’s work find a sense of community? I was recently asked to define how my work " fits in" to the permanent collection of a public gallery here in Vancouver BC Canada. This became a challenge as I first started to try and find commonalties with strong work from the collection that has gained international recognition for situating itself in the quotidian details of this place, this city Vancouver. There is much photography-based work in the collection that addresses issues surrounding identity and the urban landscape. Vancouver is listed as one of the most beautiful cities in the world where all eyes are on us as an "experiment in multi-culturalism".
There are art practices that are globally recognized as coming from this part of Canada. One can be judged according to how much their work resembles or deviates from contemporary critical canons that are established here. I began to ask myself, is this the way to describe my work, by comparing it to that which has been determined to, critically, best represent this region?
Not being originally from this city, these issues are not what drive my own particular art practice and I began to think of
the danger when work from the margins tries to closely resemble the work from the established center. The art from the margin can be dismissed as being derivative or even parody art of the center in order to fit.
(Historically, in order to gain access to the world’s art centers and systems, artists from the margins had to move to London or Paris or New York and establish themselves as local artists, without a history or a background outside their new city or adopted history).
I meet many artists, particularly ones that work in print media, that talk of living a kind of double life…living in one place and showing as an artist elsewhere, where there is a more receptive community and audience for the work. Print as a medium has far deeper roots in many other parts of the world and shares a rich history with many other disciplines. One cannot deny the inherent resonances that the medium has with the history of the mass reproduction of information, graphic arts and the dissemination of social political and religious information that have roots in older parts of the world.

When I moved to Vancouver from the Canadian Prairies where I grew up, I initially feared that my work was invalid as I entered an entirely different art community here. I had experienced great support and success in my own home city. I have since found freedom to move outside my being defined by my location and am able to see more clearly, how I had been significantly affected by my previous one.
Around 1912 a loosely knit group of artists began to paint Canada as they saw it. The now famous Group of Seven, journeyed all over the country to paint the wilderness with vivid colors and a broad, decorative style. They were united by the idea of a new Canadian style, unfettered by the European influences that then dominated art in this country. Their work created a far-reaching mythology about Canadians defining themselves by their "unspoiled wilderness".
These works are also sadly missing any trace of Canada’s aboriginal communities and have in recent years been recontextualized in ways that reveal hidden undercurrents of colonialism.
These powerful un-peopled images of Canada still haunt us, as we still cannot seem to pinpoint what our national identity is, particularly in the shadow of the USA. Even when I am outside my own country. I have a hard time realizing my specific Canadian qualities.


Communication:

English is supposedly the first language of the global communtiy. Within this language, not only are there ever growing colloquialisms that evolve out of a variety of different ethnic and economic back-grounds, knowing English doesn’t mean that one will understand it’s application in different contexts.. Also, as people commmunicate more and more through e-mail opposed to the telephone, miss- coomunication easily happens due to these quick "conversations" e-mail being deviod of accent, tone of voice, and all the sublte nuances that occur within the musicality of language. Thus the irritaitng use of little "emoticons" such as the sideways happy face and others, which are used to replace body language.

Recently I have heard people saying to one another, "I need some face time with you". Will the computer screen remedy this with our eventual talking faces? Perhaps. However, one can press the off button anytime just like hanging up the telephone. I recently spoke to a friend who was involved in a computer interview
with people half way across the world .The interveiwers’ moving faces came up on the screen. At the very end, the screen went black and he was awkwardly alone in his room .He said the feeling was very unsettling, not unlike sinking back into one’s own body after being disembodied.
I question whether or not one langauge can really become as universal as we would like it. Why the desire for such a homogenious exisitence?
Maybe the big money for the future will be in translation software. Still, I personally believe that some things are beyond translation. We hold our cultural histories in our languages, stories and oral traditions.


My Own Work

The content of my own particular artistic practice, for years, has addressed themes of domination: the psyche by the dream or ideal, the conscience by guilt, the personality by passion. I suppose I could say that these deal with the fear of the soul being in exile. I live in the free world, one where a person can be free to publicly disagree without persecution.
However, here in North America one can be a slave to many other things with the emphasis on consumerism, never having enough and where subversive ideas become chic over night. The definition of what self-actualization is, can be confusing in a place where it’s hard to find time to have soulful experiences and where many communal experiences happen in a movie theatre.

I believe that more and more, we are excepting our vicarious experiences with film, gaming, television and the Internet as experienced lived. Digital wizards are now creating computer screen "faces" that can read and mimic facial expressions. We are all dealing with new strains that have been put on the human psyche. Trying to cope with the rapid changes of living in this technological era is resulting in shared common experiences happening vicariously through a variety of screens. Entities that are created through the culture of the computer are taking on a whole new meaning as "real" and "imaginary" step onto the same plane.

One could speculate that this evolution towards a "lack of distinctive self "is almost schizophrenic in the way that we are swamping our collective unconscious with images of altered reality and experiences. Are we heading towards a post-human self where distinctions of gender, race, and class are hidden by the products of new imaging technologies? Will reference to the real be totally eclipsed? Will
reality as we know it now be eventually redefined?


What will be the new reality of the psyche and its religious, mythic and spiritual needs, dimensions and instincts? We are moving into a new age of surrealism.
Early surrealism sought to achieve a visual experience unfamiliar to the viewer. We now expect visual wizards to convince us that the imaginary appears as "real" as possible. Will imaginary experiences that were once thought to be delusional become accepted visions? We humans cannot speed up our physiological evolution naturally and are turning to technology for our next step. Will we lose our souls in the process or find the answers to the age old search for immortality?