Leslie Sacks Contemporary is excited to announce an exhibition of works by Venice Beach artist Jeremy Kidd. Working in photography & Adobe Photoshop, Kidd creates landscape and urbanscape images that are simultaneously realistic and abstract. Photographing over many days often from multiple perspectives, Kidd will use hundreds of these photographs in the same way a painter uses a palette of oils and acrylics. His process of layering and composing these photographs results in the final irregular shaped artwork with relates to the assemblage process.
Jeremy Kidd’s work is a direct nod to David Hockney’s photographic collages of the 1980’s, such as Pearblossom Highway, 11-18th 1986. Hockney creates a flat cubist composition using color photographs, which requires the viewer to connect these visually fragmented components of a deconstructed scene in order to assess the complete image. In contrast, Jeremy Kidd presents a seamless collage that access the subjective realm of time and memory, as the works evolve away from their photographic source; Providing a highly manipulated image, thrusting the viewer into his fictional reality.
Trained as a sculptor, Jeremy Kidd’s interest is in the American Hudson River School and British tradition of landscapes and the philosophical idea of the sublime. In Waterbowl, 2005, Kidd again combines multiple photographs to create an overall sense of the location, not just a particular moment in time. Dawn and dusk, clouds and clear skies, dark and translucent water appear together in one hyper-real moment in time as created by the artist. The large-scale and irregular angles of the composition allow for multiple entry points, inviting the viewer to step into this created landscape and experience nature’s sublime.
In his urbanscapes, Jeremy Kidd creates the same sense of the sublime in the setting of a contemporary metropolis. As with artists like Thomas Cole travel has become an integral part of the practice. In Oriental Pearl I, (Pudong Shanghai) 2013 Kidd explains that he envisions, “…the structures and forms growing and replicating, deconstructing and reconstructing”. This emphasizes the “biomorphic quality” of the architecture. The layering of photographs incorporates deep perspectives from a range of angles, creating a dichotomy of depth and flatness in a single image. The streaking bright lights, swirling sidewalks and towering buildings impress upon the viewer the overwhelming feeling, or sense of the sublime, that one would have standing in the midst of this city.
A billboard by Jeremy Kidd can be seen in Culver City as part of Otis College’s exhibition West of the 405. Jeremy Kidd’s work is the permanent collection of the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, the American Embassy in Algeria and the American Embassy in Panama.
Hi-Res jpeg’s available.