Monte Clark

October 17 to November 14, 2015

In his exhibition at Monte Clark Gallery, Owen Kydd presents a selection of new works including photographic murals and videos on digital screens.

Writer Aaron Peck first described Kydd’s early video works on monitors as “durational photographs,” pieces that challenged the boundaries between photography and video while at the same time resisting aspects of cinema inherent to moving images. Kydd has since continued to create video works that tend to avoid or cancel narrative in favour of foregrounding photographic conditions. In his new square format digital works, Kydd maintains his dialogue with the moving image, but this time focuses on computer-generated videos and studio-based animations.

Flush to the wall, the large format photographic murals Kydd has installed echo a version of tableau photography, to which he has applied methods that he gleaned from the screen to interfere with narrative impulses. He assigns an architectural depth to an image by installing it around a corner, reveals a frame-blending technique that relies on the computer, or in another case creates a video plane on top of the photograph. As such, these photographic murals echo durational photographs by eschewing expectations when considering moving and still imagery, and it is in the relationship between the two modes of picture making where Kydd engages in a dialogue at the forefront of the photographic medium.

Owen Kydd studied at SFU and UCLA and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He has recently exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, and the International Center of Photography (New York). Kydd’s works are housed in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the San Francisco MoMA, the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Albright-Knox Museum (Buffalo, New York), and numerous others.