Kelly Richardson: Forest Park

January 11 - March 23, 2008
Visionary Landscapes #1
Organized by KW|AG

"My work broadly focuses on the restitution of the sublime from an ordinary or flawed moment, attempting to amass a series of often conflicting sensations. With an interest in creating contemplative spaces or things loaded with double meanings, the work explores notions of simultaneity as a way of summating feelings associated with the hugely complicated world we have created for ourselves; magnificent and equally dreadful. Exploring the use of cinematic language to create part real, part imagined landscapes - offering visual metaphors for our modern 'reality', a wavering hybrid of fact and fiction - they question our place in the world and point to something greater than ourselves." - Kelly Richardson

 

Kelly Richardson, Forest Park, 2007, high-definition video projection. Image courtesy of the artist and KW|AG. Photo: K.J. Bedford.

Kelly Richardson's work has consistently offered viewers a beautified view of pending doom - a sense of awe and tranquil disaster via digitally manipulated images of seemingly vacant landscapes. This exhibition marks the premiere of Forest Park, a two-channel video projection which features a not-so-freshly cleared lot for a future housing development - a vista punctuated by numerous gently flickering streetlights. Richardson's Exiles of the Shattered Star, featured in KW|AG's foyer, presents an English countryside showered with the flaming remnants of a distant place. In each of these works, Richardson proposes a sublime mix of both fantasy and reality in images that are as much about the present as they are the future. Forest Park is the first instalment in KW|AG's Visionary Landscapes series, a selection of projects that re-conceive the familiar, show us possible futures, and hybridize geographies.

Read the online publication featuring texts by John Massier, Curator of HALLWALLS (Buffalo, NY) and a conversation between Kelly Richardson and Assistant Curator Crystal Mowry.

Kelly Richardson, Exiles of the Shattered Star (video still), 2006. high definition / standard definition video projection. Image courtesy of the artist.

About Kelly Richardson
Born in Canada, Kelly Richardson's works have been exhibited internationally at various venues including Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, UK; Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia; Art Gallery of Ontario; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Her work was recently acquired by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.) and will be featured in their upcoming exhibition The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image. Richardson lives and works in the United Kingdom and is represented by Birch Libralato (Toronto).