kellyrichardson.net

August was spent at the Gushul Artist Residency in the beautiful Canadian Rockies to research and begin production for a series of new works for a solo exhibition at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in 2011.

For a sneak peak at some of the landscapes filmed, have a look at Kelly Richardson’s Facebook page

Current exhibition:

Birch Libralato
Essential Works Show V 1989 - 2009
January 6 - February 9, 2010

Celebrating significant moments and work from the days of Birganart, The Robert Birch Gallery and now, Birch Libralato

Gallery hours Wednesday to Saturday
11-5 or by appointment

Birch Libralato
129 Tecumseth Street
Toronto, ON
416.365.3003
www.birchlibralato.com

Toronto International Art Fair

One of the annual highlights of the Toronto International Art Fair is “The News at Five,” a series of daily exhibitions curated by Canadian Art editor Richard Rhodes. This year “The News at Five” focuses on the theme of promise, spotlighting artists profiled in Canadian Art’s current 25th anniversary issue. Looking at the connection between art, hope and the future, these artists are setting the pace for generations of contemporary artists to come.

Each day of the fair, Canadian Art will also be hosting a talk by Rhodes about the featured artists: Jed Lind, Adad Hannah, Corin Sworn, Valérie Blass, Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke, Kelly Richardson and Daniel Borins and Jennifer Marman. These discussions, free with fair admission, happen at 5pm sharp on October 23, 24 and 25 at the Canadian Art booth, which is located just north of the TIAF entrance elevators.

In another must-see event at TIAF, Canadian Art publisher Melony Ward is moderating a forum on art publishing in the digital age. The panel features Adrian Searle, chief art critic of the Guardian, Anton Vidokle, artist and creator of e-flux, and Greg van Alstyne, director of research at the Ontario College of Art and Design’s Strategic Innovation Lab. The panel, organized by the Power Plant, takes place on October 24 at 2pm in room 204 of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. The forum is free with TIAF admission or is $10 for a general-public ticket.

For more information about special events at TIAF, please visit
www.tiafair.com/special_projects/

New York Times
At the Americans for the Arts gala, Robert Redford receives a lifetime achievement award from Nancy Pelosi, Kelly Richardson is the featured artist, and honorees Salman Rushdie and Ed Ruscha talk with Melena Ryzik about the meaning of artistic awards.

Watch the coverage here.

Robert Redford at the Americans for the Arts National Arts Awards

Salman Rushdie accepting his award

Ed Ruscha interviewed

Howlin' Wolf

THE STAR
Critic’s choice

Back in 2002, a Nova Scotia grocery magnate decided it would be a good idea to hand out $50,000 every couple of years to an up-and-coming Canadian artist, to help a promising career gain momentum.

To say that it’s worked is an understatement. By focusing on young (under 40, that is) artists, the Sobey Prize has generated a level of excitement the country’s visual arts scene has probably never known: Putting the focus on future potential, not past achievement, Sobey has done what no one else in Canada has been able to do: Generate actual enthusiasm about the country’s visual culture.

Now an annual affair, and upped to $70,000, this year’s field is probably the strongest yet, with the region-specific shortlist having been boiled down to Luanne Martineau for the West Coast and Yukon; Graeme Patterson for the Atlantic region; Marcel Dzama for Prairies and North; David Altmejd for Quebec; and for Ontario, Toronto’s Shary Boyle.

But the long list for Ontario, meanwhile, reveals the embarrassment of riches we have in emerging artists here. With the shortlist whittled down to one representative, the talent left on the floor seems worthy of another award all on its own. There being no local Loblaw Prize to fill the gap, we’ll have to settle for the Cambridge Galleries’ upcoming show of Ontarian Sobey long-listers, which includes Derek Sullivan, Luis Jacob, Kelly Richardson, the team of Christian Giroux and Daniel Young, and, of course, Boyle. The show opens tomorrow at 7:30, with a free bus service departing the Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen St. W.) at 5:30 p.m. For a tour through your hometown/province’s explosive artistic potential, it’ll be hard to beat.

Murray Whyte

Cambridge Galleries
Sobey Art Award: Ontario Shortlist
Cambridge Galleries Queen’s Square
July 10 - August 22, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, July 10 at 7:00 pm
Cambridge, Ontario, Canada

Twilight Avenger

126 with the Galway Film Fleadh presents:

TWILIGHT AVENGER
Video works by Kelly Richardson

July 7th through July 12th, 2009
Opening reception: Wednesday July 8th, 8pm.
After-party at Bar No. 8
Galway, Ireland

There will be a one-on-one artist talk between Richardson and Galway based director and writer Katherine Waugh, Wednesday July 8th at 126 from 7-8pm

Kelly Richardson will be showing two video works, Twilight Avenger and Wagons Roll, in a dual screen installation at 126’s new city centre gallery.

Kelly Richardson’s primary interest is in exploring simultaneity, affect and the use of cinematic language to create part real /part imagined landscapes, offering visual metaphors for modern ‘reality’, a wavering hybrid of fact and fiction. With an interest in creating contemplative spaces 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. Richardson questions our place in the world, with allusions to political, cultural, societal and environmental issues and points to something greater than ourselves.

Kelly Richardson was born in Burlington, Ontario, Canada in 1972. She studied fine art at the Ontario College of Art & Design (AOCAD with honours) and media studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (MFA studies). Her works have been exhibited internationally at various venues including the Sundance Film Festival, USA (2009), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Quebec (2009), Busan Biennale, Korea (2008), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, USA (2008), Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal, Canada (2007), Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, UK (2005), Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2004), Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2002-2003) and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2002). Her work was recently acquired by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, New York), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Montréal, Canada) and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington DC, USA). She was long listed for Canada’s pre-eminent prize for contemporary art, the Sobeys Art Award two years running (2008 and 2009) and will be the featured artist for this years Americans for the Arts National Arts Award held in New York City. She lives and works in the United Kingdom.

Other Worlds
Confederation Centre of the Arts
June 6 - August 23, 2009

Other Worlds is an exhibition in the form of a fabulatory essay examining the role of the artist as a visual explorer in literal and symbolic dimensions. It brings together painting, photography and video works by Canadian and international artists from the mid-19th century to present day.

The historical thread is drawn from Bernard Smith’s 1960 book European Vision and the South Pacific, a study of James Cook’s three voyages —1768-71, 1772-75 and 1776-79—that explored the Pacific Rim, the northwest coast of North America and the Bering Sea, and Antarctica. It was Smith’s contention that the trained artists Cook enlisted had to develop a visual language in order to record new phenomenon—impressions of light for example—while maintaining the empirical demands of research. This “impressionism” would have a transformative impact on art (and the viewer), bringing together the art of seeing and art as information. The earliest exhibition work is an 1864 painting by Robert Scott Duncanson (the first recorded African-American artist), of Owl’s Head Mountain at Lake Memphremagog, which straddles the Quebec-Vermont border. Two 1899 oil sketches by Canadian William Blair Bruce—then living in Sweden—are of Gotland Island in the Baltic Sea and a view from the coast of Saint Nazaire, France. More than illustrating what appears to the eye, there is an expression of the Sublime, an embodiment of experience of place and thought.

Although the recording role of artist-painters diminished in the 20th century due to photography, there were still remote locales and a lure of the unknown, voyages of discovery, routes of wandering, and an ever-changing frontier of visual language. Examples are paintings of Newfoundland, Alaska and Greenland done between 1914-1929 by American Rockwell Kent, and of Papua New Guinea by Australian William Dobell, who visited in 1949-1950. Their respective painting languages are different, but share a form of the surreal and witnessing for the first time. The continuing fascination with remote locales is evidenced in the photographic work by Lorraine Gilbert of a trek in Iceland, and Rosemary Laing’s use of the Australian desert as a site. Again, there is a surreal quality to both, but achieved by different means. So too for Stacey Spiegel’s panoramic view of mountains from Banff, using digital technology to transform the image and “embed” the phenomenon of freezing, thawing, flow and erosion. It expresses weather and geological time through the eternal mountain (a subject link to the Duncanson and Kent paintings).

“Other worlds” can be generated from the familiar and ready-known. John Massey’s This Land photographs combine the interior of a “freshly minted” car as a framing device for landscapes, which in another age would have been painted. Massey uses a language common to advertising, but from another perspective, it is the new sublime, although intentionally disquieting.

Time-based media lends itself to both pictorial manipulation and a narrative, as in the works by Rodney Graham and Kelly Richardson. Graham constructs an episode from the past in Vexation Island that is both a fairy tale and a fabulation. Rather than the events of the shipwreck, it is looped through causality, the castaway’s attempt (played by Graham) to survive by shaking a coconut from a palm tree. Paradise can be an eternal nightmare. Kelly Richardson’s Exiles from a Shattered Planet, is also a looped video, a continual cascade of flaming debris from the sky—“visitors” from another world —onto a “sublime” landscape (a view comparable to the one in Duncanson’s painting.) There is, however, no cataclysmic end to Earth, and rather than fear, we can “stand in awe.” So too for the floating heads in Laing’s work, a hallucinatory interjection onto the landscape.

Painting as a tool and medium for the exploration of place and thought is by no means exhausted, and hence the inclusion of works by Brian Burke. Failed Experiment #2, has a literal, pictorial quality—a trek into a bleak unknown—but the title suggests a cautionary tale of folly and oblivion, and has as much resonance for the human spirit as does “success.” The nature of the “experiment” is left to our imagination. Dead Man’s Pond #9, brings the “other world” to the local. It is a pond in a Charlottetown, PEI park with several speculations on how it was named. Burke has depicted an “explorer” swimming in the pond, but in search of what? The title and images offers a segue to David Burliuk’s opus painting-mural Surrealist Conception of Life, 1932. Burliuk arrived in the USA from Siberia via Japan in late 1922; the New World was his other world. His painting reduces the Atlantic Ocean to a “pond,” and among its many complex, allegorical pictorial elements of “the savage and the cultured,” is Columbus (most likely) as if a castaway blowing a bubble of the world through a pipe.

The power of art is the possibility of recording information, expressing innermost thoughts, and telling stories. Doors can be opened to “other worlds” as a way of knowing. Every fictional world is based on a reality, which can return to confront “our world” in a cognitive way, and likewise, “other worlds” can feed the imagination. The continuation of mysteries is as important as answers.

Artist list: Rodney Graham, Kelly Richardson, John Massey, Robert Scott Duncanson, Rockwell Kent, William Blair Bruce, Rosemary Laing, William Dobell, Brian Burke, David Burliuk, Stacey Spiegel, Lorraine Gilbert

Further information for Other Worlds at the Confederation Centre of the Arts

Kelly Richardson
Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
May 6 to June 28, 2009
Beverley Webster Rolph Hall (lower level)

Kelly Richardson’s Exiles of the Shattered Star, recently acquired by the Musée, will be screened as a solo presentation. Exiles of the Shattered Star is a video lasting almost 30 minutes shown as an unending loop. In June 2006, Richardson filmed a sunrise in the Lake District, England, a region famous for the staggering beauty of its landscape. Into this fixed-sequence, almost unreal, footage the artist inserted a rain of fireballs, composing a surrealist picture that demonstrates her love of the eerie. The title, Exiles of the Shattered Star, suggests a distant catastrophe, the explosion of a star whose fragments have come to “find exile” in this corner of paradise. Kelly Richardson was born in Burlington, Ontario, in 1972. Since 2003, she has lived and worked in Gateshead, England.

Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal

Art Gallery of Nova Scotia
Forces of Nature
April 11 - May 31, 2009

Twilight Avenger

As I watched the water seeping through the concrete floor outside our main temporary exhibition space, it struck me- there is no controlling Nature. Water in an art gallery is a dangerous thing and as the spring thaw approached, a hard decision had to be made: as Nature couldn’t be trusted to stay out of our Gallery spaces, the exhibition of historical prints, paintings and decorative arts from the National Gallery, Lord Dalhousie: Patron and Collector had to be postponed. Well, if Nature was going to be so present in the Art Gallery, it became clear that it must be on display. In Forces of Nature, an exhibition designed to be waterproof, four video works, drawn primarily from the Gallery’s permanent collection, examine artists’ relationships to the natural world.

David Askevold, Katherine Knight, Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, along with Kelly Richardson have created works of art that explore mediation, danger, and seduction in both natural and constructed land and seascapes.

David Askevold’s meditative projection, Latrajarg (The Cliff), follows seagulls on a cliff, and provides an exploration of figure and ground. In this early video work Askevold creates a contemplative work of art, delighting in the sea, light and motion created by the birds against sea. In the same way, Katherine Knight layers sound and video in a hypnotic nautical portrait in her work Buoy. Beacons to sailors, the buoys of Knight’s work call to us, their mournful cries almost swallowed by the ever-present sound of the ocean. Knight photographed these buoys in Caribou Harbour, near Pictou, NS, but as the three channel video work bobs, dips and ebbs before your eyes, the scene transcends place and makes a mariner of any viewer.

Emily Vey Duke + Cooper Battersby delve the highs and lows of human of nature in their most recent work, Beauty Plus Pity. Their exploration of innocence, good and evil and the human relationship to the natural world is offered in compiled vignettes and animated stories told through a varied cast, including hunters, young children, and God. In Kelly Richardson’s Twilight Avenger, an eerie green glow engulfs a stag in a twinkling forest landscape… Or perhaps that glow is emanating from the stag. That constructed tension is part of the compelling mystery of Richardson’s work. Richardson has digitally manipulated this bucolic scene, adding twilight, mist, the hoot of owls to trees and grass from different forests. She blurs the real and the surreal, allowing an uneasy vision forest life.

Curated by Sarah Fillmore

For Immediate Release March 10, 2009

2009 Sobey Art Award Longlist Announced