Angelina Kidd, MFA is a Pacific Northwest artist specializing in the handmade: historical photographic processes, constructed imagery collage and paper arts.

Born to a Cuban father and an American mother of Filipino and Polynesian descent, Angelina spent her early years in Honolulu, Hawai'i, before moving to the mainland. Angelina received her Master of Fine Arts from Lesley University School of Art & Design in Boston and has been featured in galleries and exhibitions around the country.

Angelina has two distinct bodies of work. The first focuses on the solitude found in nature and quiet human spaces, from forests and coastlines to graveyards and abandoned locations. The second comprises her constructed imagery creations—small handcrafted scenes that tell a story using photographs instead of words. Through her use of alternative and historical processes such as silhouette photography, wet plate collodion, cyanotype, and palladium, Angelina aims to preserve traditional forms of photography while expanding the discipline to new artistic horizons.

I use photography to convey several themes. One is the possibility of life after life and the passage of the soul between these two planes of existence. Another is the theme of humanity's relationship with the natural world and its mysteries. In many of my photographs I use animals as characters, both as actors in their own right and to convey aspects of human experience to the viewer. The key elements of light, shadow and color combine with each of these themes to suggest an overarching sense of longing.

At its most elemental level, photography is about light. Early photographs required long exposures to capture the necessary light for a composition, and even in today’s world of instant digital images, light remains the single most important aspect of photography. 

“A Light Heist” is a recognition of the centrality of light to the craft of photography. A photograph is more than a moment captured in time; it is also the light on a certain place in a certain moment, stolen and preserved for future viewers. The invention of photography made it possible for time to be stopped and light to be kept even though the natural state of both time and light is impermanence. In this sense, every photograph is a “light heist.”

There is a whimsy to these words beyond their photographic significance, however, and several of my works play with the idea of “a light heist.” The magic of photography lies in its ability to both exactly reproduce the world and suggest a new way of looking at it, and the multiple meanings of “A Light Heist” echo that. I hope that my work encourages viewers to appreciate the miracle embodied in every photograph.