Material Resonance – Diane DallasKidd

Opening Reception
* Sunday, March 10, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Artist Talk: Diane DallasKidd will be in conversation with Jodi Roberts, Executive Director, Marin MOCA
* Thursday, March 14, 6:00 pm
Exhibition Dates:
* March 10 – April 20

Sarah Shepard Gallery iwelcomes back Bay Area artist Diane DallasKidd for her third exhibition with a solo show of 11 new works.

Deeply informed by the language and form of traditional Japanese textile techniques, DallasKidd navigates both the intersections and permeable boundaries between craft and contemporary art practices, finding new expressions in cloth and fiber.

Mining the creative possibilities unearthed in the process of making—twisting, spooling or draping thread, manipulating or painting textiles, piercing paper or other surfaces, suspending woven assemblages—DallasKidd plays with textural and dimensional expression, using the luminous tones, patterns, and shapes of both the natural and urban landscapes.

The exhibition’s title, Material Resonance, brings to the forefront the idea of resonance: the phenomenon where an object vibrates at the same natural frequency as another.

“Through pattern, rhyme, and repetition, I am resonating with the medium at hand,” DallasKidd explains. The emotional processing of her mother’s move back to Japan inspired both Reverb, with its outward-moving spiraling circles of linen thread, and Chords, with twisted bundles of linen threads, attached with bells.

“The bells represent an immaterial external presence, a kind of reassurance and healing frequency. The twisted thread is cut at the bottom, a signal of letting go, like umbilical cords,” she says.

Punch Cards is a new series, inspired by the roots of computer data storage in the weaving patterns of Jacquard loom punch cards. Persimmon, Feather, and Night Sky are additions to an ongoing series based on Kasuri (Japanese ikat) textiles.

In the Tracing Waves series, a record of tide levels in the SF Bay with dates based on the Moon’s phase and proximity, she manipulates colored threads, a shift from the black threads of earlier works.

A San Francisco native, DallasKidd graduated from San Francisco State University with a BFA in Textile Art. Her work has been shown in galleries nationally and throughout the Bay Area, including recent exhibits at the Minnesota Street Project and Root Division in San Francisco and the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art.

Diane DallasKidd was born and raised in San Francisco and graduated from San Francisco State University with a BFA in Textile Art.

She traveled to Japan to continue studies under Tsuyoshi Kuno, a 4th generation master dyer who adapted centuries old dyeing techniques to create new material for avant-garde designers such as Issey Miyake and for productions such as Cirque du Soleil.

Learning from artists who push creative boundaries while honoring traditional process continues to influence DallasKidd’s own artwork.

DallasKidd is continually motivated to draw something new and unexpected from the medium with a focus on process, whether it is folding paper to delineate planes of space in her paintings on wood or painting singular threads and suspending them to create ethereal forms.

She often begins her exploration with a feeling more so than a fixed outcome in mind. Her resulting works are textural and dimensional, echoing patterns and shapes found in the natural and urban landscape.