Kris Davidson
Anacortes, Washington
Photographer / collage artist working with American stories across the past, present and future
MessageA native of Sweden, Kris Davidson spent the first half of her childhood in the Scandinavian subarctic and the second half in Texas. After 15 years as an editorial photographer, Kris is now a full-time lens-based artist. With an immigrant gaze, she considers the American experience, focusing on storytelling across the past, present, and future. She uses collage and mixed media on photographic prints to explore storytelling and memory across deep time.
Kris’s photography has been published in National Geographic Traveler, Lonely Planet Traveler, and many others. Before becoming a photographer, Kris worked as a branding professional for eight years in the San Francisco Bay area. Kris is also an educator, having worked with National Geographic Society and the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.
Kris has a BA from Loyola University in New Orleans. She is currently working towards an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with expected completion in 2025. She is based near Seattle, Washington.
Statement
OVERVIEW
Kris Davidson's photography-based practice delves into unresolved tensions within the American storytelling tradition with a focus on how narratives evolve across time. She frequently works with myths, tall tales, and legends to reveal hidden connections between fictions and their factual historical origins. Her investigation into the lifecycles of American stories spans past, present, and future.
In her photo-based collage work, she employs various methods of slicing, folding, reorganizing and flattening moments in time. Her collages portray time as an endless continuum, challenging the traditional view of storytelling as sequential. Davidson suggests that all versions of our stories, in their diverse forms, might exist simultaneously and indefinitely. From this perspective, time is no longer a direct route, but rather an expansive, borderless instant where the beginnings and endings of all stories remain obscured and unknown.
IN MY OWN WORDS
If I were to distill my creative life down to a single word, it would be translation. My longest-running act of translation began at age nine, when my family left the snow-covered Swedish subarctic for Texas. As we stepped off the plane in Dallas, everything shifted: the air was heavy and warm, the sky was larger, a necessity for a brighter, more demanding sun. Everything we had known had to be translated to fit this new place: our language, our food, our clothes, the stories we had carried with us. I have spent years crisscrossing the shifting chasm known to all immigrants. I understand that in all acts of translation, new meanings are forged, just as others are lost.
In my work, I am primarily concerned with how American stories are translated across time. Stories are the pillars of the self, showing us who have been, who we are now, and who we are becoming — and yet, stories are intangible as they slide across time, shapeshifting between fact and fiction. My work investigating the lifecycles of American stories across the past, present, and future has pulled me towards the specter of deep time. Scientists have not yet reached a consensus on what time is — some have suggested that all time already exists, that we might be caught in an infinite instant that already includes our future. I create collages with photographs — slicing and reorganizing slivers of frozen time — to explore how our stories might exist indefinitely in deep time.
Across all my projects, I look at how Americans arbitrarily hold and reject aspects of their wide-ranging stories, and how this gives shape to a continually shifting national identity. I seek to reconcile storytelling with intergenerational equity, considering the responsibility storytellers have to their ancestors and descendants. I am especially interested in how Americans are working with their most difficult stories, and how these narratives continue to shape-shift as they move across generations.
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