Kris Davidson
Seattle, Washington
Artist working in photography and collage, collapsing past, present, and future while probing how technology mediates reality and fiction.
MessageKris Davidson is a Swedish-born artist whose formative years spanned the Scandinavian subarctic and Texas. Her work explores how stories—personal, ancestral, and speculative—are translated across time. Using collage and mixed media on photographic prints, she investigates the unreliable nature of memory and the evolving role of media in shaping identity, myth, and meaning.
Before transitioning into a research-driven art practice, Kris spent 15 years as an editorial photographer for leading international publications. Her photographic and narrative assignments have spanned six continents, appearing consistently across the print and digital platforms of National Geographic, Lonely Planet, and other global media outlets. With a background in branding and communications, she brings a critical awareness of how images function as carriers of meaning in mediated environments.
She has taught for the National Geographic Society in multiple locations and at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Her work is grounded in an inquiry-based approach that draws from media theory, posthumanism, and cultural history.
Kris holds a BA from Loyola University in New Orleans and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She is based near Seattle, Washington.
An archive of her editorial and commercial photography can be viewed here.
Statement
I create large-scale, lens-based artworks that merge photography, speculative fiction, and emerging technologies to tell stories across time. Working with staged and unstaged photography, archival material, and generative AI, I construct surreal compositions—speculative portraits and uncanny landscapes—where human and machine perception blur, and the boundaries between memory, myth, and media collapse. These pieces are built through a hybrid process of digital and manual collage, designed to evoke a temporal state in which all time exists simultaneously and storytelling evolves into new, recursive forms.
Three core questions guide this practice: How do the life cycles of stories shape identity and cultural memory across generations? How does fiction help metabolize complex or traumatic experience? And how does our understanding of time—through concepts like deep time and the block universe—influence how we tell and receive stories?
Anchored in research and speculative storytelling, my practice engages media theory, posthumanism, and cultural history, alongside personal and inherited mythologies—at a moment when the very structures that carry stories are unraveling, and the once-clear lines between sender, message, and receiver are collapsing into a recursive system where memory and machine rewrite each other.
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