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TAIKOO ISLAND EAST 2 (2011)

Fictional Realities

For Jeremy Kidd it seems unrealistic to expect a single photographic image at a single moment in time to convey the human experience of seeing.“We visually explore our environment in the third and fourth dimensions as we build our personal visual journey”, he explains.  For the past ten years, he has been utilizing his background as a sculptor and painter to push the photographic realm and explore the modern environment.Using multiple time-lapse photographs, expansive panoramic views and careful alterations of the images he captures the enigmatic drama of place.“My goal is to engage the viewer by conveying an animated experience of the dynamic urban infrastructure and landscape.  I’m exploring the transcendental aspects of this genre.”

Essence

The images in his latest ‘Fictional Realities’ series are composed from up to one hundred long exposures, melded together into a single piece.“They are as much about what traditional photography is not, as they are about what it can be made to do:  exploring movement, time, multiple viewpoints and the subjectivity of experience. For me it’s a more cohesive way of expressing the filmic.” This way of working allows Jeremy to explore movement and condensed time which lends itself to his concerns about exemplifying the essence of place, in the urban landscape.“Though I am not directly referencing I draw parallels with the methods of artists of the Hudson River School Painters and have in mind the often-transcendental qualities that are encountered in their landscapes. However I aim to extol something of this spirit within the urban context.“An ‘urbanized idealism’, he calls it.

Panorama

Jeremy aims to present a condensed vision of multiple photographs as a metaphor for repeated perceptual glances. In addition he wants to engage the viewer by conveying an animated experience of the dynamic urban infrastructure. During the assemblage into coherent panoramic vistas, the scenes are altered and evolve away from the original source to become a metaphor for memory: “As do our experiences when they depart over time from the observed source.” Jeremy, British born but living and working in Los Angeles, started this series over a decade ago. The first piece was catalyzed by a show at Cirrus Gallery in the city of angles, where the brief was to illustrate the poem ‘Ariel’ by Silvia Plath.“I was heading out to the desert (Palm Springs in California) and was impressed with the drama and scale of the landscape and felt it related well to the poem. I found an old armchair that was perched atop a dusty mountain in Desert Hot Springs, with a view back to San Jacinto Mountain. From there I surveyed the landscape and was struck by the prospect of trying to recreate the grand unfolding landscape with the inadequacies of a single photograph. It seemed quite obvious that I was going to have to use multiple shots to try and convey this scene in sight and sense. I was compelled to move a step further from existing work by choosing to painstakingly blend and meld together many of the shots onto a panoramic image. I also felt it was important to combine different times of day in the finished work. To my knowledge I am perhaps the first to do this.”

CHRYSLER 2 (2006)