NYAB Event - Billy Kidd “Transience”

Billy Kidd “Transience”

Masters & Pelavin

This event has ended.

Masters & Pelavin presents the first solo exhibition by fine art and fashion photographer, Billy Kidd. The show, Transience, presents large-format photographic prints of Kidd’s elegant black-and-white female nudes juxtaposed with the artists lush saturated images of equally elegant – but dying – flowers.

By interspersing the nudes among decomposing flower images, the show explores themes of feminine beauty, desire and its transience. Kidd’s female bodies are soft and lithe, anonymous torsos arranged in reclining and often passionate or subtly erotic poses. Imbued with an undercurrent of sexual desire as the nudes arch and undulate within their frame, some remain pictorially classical, recalling Greek and Roman sculpture, while others appear to be in the throes of rapture. The bend and sway of the flowers mimics and intensifies the rhythm of the interspersed torsos, the flower an obvious allusion to the female body. But instead of the more languid, youthful beauty of the nudes, the decomposing flowers are like exquisite but fragile older women, their age giving them added texture and power.

Kidd’s interest in the aging process and its inherent beauty is apparent in the intricate surface details in many of his images, such as goose bumps on the model’s skin, or tiny veins patterning the flower petals. Unlike retouched photographs, where imperfections are covered or artificially erased, Kidd’s images expose the often hidden details that make the model human, or indicate the flower was once fully alive.

Kidd’s examination of the female form’s intrinsic classical beauty, coupled with the inevitability of our mortality, acknowledges and celebrates the artistic and expressive potential of aging.