Kris Davidson

SAIC SHOWS 2025 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Graduates

SAIC SHOWS 2025 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts Degree

Kris Davidson is a Swedish-born artist whose early life spanned the Scandinavian subarctic and Texas. She spent 15 years working as an editorial photographer before transitioning into a research-driven art practice that explores how stories are translated across past, present, and future. Using collage and mixed media on photographic prints, Kris investigates memory, media, and storytelling across deep time.

Her photography has appeared in National Geographic Traveler, Lonely Planet Traveler, and other major international publications. Before her photography career, Kris worked in branding and communications in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is also an experienced educator, having collaborated with the National Geographic Society and the Academy of Art University.

Kris Davidson - An Incomplete Portrait of Inez, Panel 1

An Incomplete Portrait of Inez, Panel 1, 36 in x 45 in. Printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 paper.

A woman holds a Real Doll head against a digitally manipulated backdrop. Process: Photographic capture and digital compositing in Photoshop. No generative AI used.

Kris Davidson - An Incomplete Portrait of Inez, Panel 2

An Incomplete Portrait of Inez, Panel 2, 36 in x 45 in. Printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 paper with lenticular overlay.

A visual metaphor for time collapse overlays a Mojave desert scene and a Hubble starscape. Process: Photography, Photoshop, and lenticular printing. Overlay adhered with pH-neutral glue. No generative AI used.

Kris Davidson - An Incomplete Portrait of Inez, Panel 3

An Incomplete Portrait of Inez, Panel 3, 36 in x 45 in. Printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 paper with lenticular overlay.

An AI companion stands among her human family. The lenticular overlay masks the human figure’s face. Process: Photography, Photoshop, and lenticular printing. Generative AI used to modify body forms and baby doll’s eyes. Embellished with rephotographed materials.

Kris Davidson - An Incomplete Portrait of Inez, Panel 5

An Incomplete Portrait of Inez, Panel 5, 36 in x 45 in. Printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 paper.

A Real Doll holds its own head. Process: Photographic capture and Photoshop compositing. No generative AI used.

Lenticular overlays

Video capture illustrating the lenticular overlays on panels 2 and 3.

Kris Davidson is a transdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of photography, collage, speculative fiction, and emerging technologies. Her practice explores how stories—ancestral, imagined, and algorithmic—migrate across time, blending fact and fiction, memory and myth. She approaches storytelling as a cultural technology: a way of encoding the past and shaping the future.

Her current project, Remember the Future, features large-scale photographic collages that combine archival imagery, generative AI, and staged photographs of embodied AI figures. These speculative companions appear in constructed desert scenes where reality and simulation collapse.

Davidson’s work is grounded in three key themes: the life cycles of stories and their role in cultural memory; the utility of fiction in processing complex or traumatic experience; and the layered nature of time. Drawing from media theory, posthumanism, and personal mythologies, she asks what it means to remember in an era when machines shape memory and vision.

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