Casemore Kirkeby is pleased to announce Owen Kydd: Time Image, the inaugural exhibition at the gallery’s new location at 1275 Minnesota Street. The exhibition will open on Friday, March 18th, as part of the grand opening of Minnesota Street Project.
Over the past several years, Owen Kydd has captivated viewers with his “durational photographs”—works that exist in a liminal zone between stillness and motion, image and object. With Time Image, Owen Kydd further complicates ideas around duration, bringing in tongue-in-cheek humor, a heightened sense of theatricality as objects animate in unexpected ways, and a renewed interest in the possibilities and limitations of traditional photographic representation. In a series of large-scale vinyl works mounted directly to the gallery walls, Kydd takes on large format conceptual photographs, their commanding scale and realism interrupted by Kydd’s curious interventions. Shorn of frames, they exist in the social space of the gallery and its architecture. Without losing any of their narrative charge, they become elegant and surprising meditations on motion and stasis, providing visual, physical and psychic escape routes from the tight order of the photograph. Here, Owen Kydd generously expands the concept of the large tableau image to incorporate the socio-political implications of looking from a particular space and time. As with his durational videos, the images take on their own agency and, in doing so, change the game.
As a film student at UCLA, Kydd became interested in what philosopher Gilles Deleuze termed the “time image” in the cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ozu—a non-narrative presentation of time that directly corresponds to real-time duration or the “lived time” of the audience. Kydd’s subsequent experiments with non-narrative imagery led him out of the film department and into UCLA’s MFA program. He then started wandering Pico Boulevard pointing his camera through dusty shop windows to find his quotidian subject matter. But Kydd brought new tools and with them, new questions. Using his DSLR’s video function, his camera remained still while the objects he terms “static” and “resistant to change” subtly shifted or responded visually to the movement around them. Played in continuous loops on advertising display screens that mimic both a traditional photographic frame and a physical window, Kydd’s resulting durational photographs keep the viewer in a suspended state of attentiveness—a slippery perceptual zone between the moment of filming and the experience of viewing.
Born in Calgary in 1975, Owen Kydd lives and works in Los Angeles. He holds an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles (2012), and has presented his works at the Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo (2016), Norton Museum, Miami (2016), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2015), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2015) the International Center of Photography, New York (2014), FOAM Photography Museum, Amsterdam (2014), LACMA, Los Angeles (2014), Galerie Xippas, Paris (2014), Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth (2014), and the Daegu Photo Biennial in Korea (2012). In 2015, Kydd was a finalist for the Aimia/AGO Photography Prize, one of the most important awards for contemporary photography.