Kelly Richardson: The Weather Makers
DCADundee, Scotland
23 September – 26 November 2017

Canadian artist Kelly Richardson creates hyper-real digital films of rich and complex landscapes that have been manipulated using CGI, animation and sound. For her first solo exhibition in Scotland, and as part of our annual Discovery Film Festival, Richardson will be transforming DCA’s galleries with these huge audio-visual installations, creating futuristic dystopian worlds for visitors to immerse themselves in.

Richardson weaves together myth and metaphor with scientific research and new digital technologies to create vast works such as Mariner 9, which presents a panoramic view of a Martian landscape set hundreds of years in the future, littered with the rusting remains from various missions to the planet. Interplanetary offerings like this are presented alongside further artworks such as Orion Tide and Leviathan, offering up more earthly but no less cataclysmic worlds to step into that hinge on the fringes of reality and fantasy.

Alongside these installations drawing on histories of landscape painting, wildlife cinematography, science fiction and apocalyptic cinema, is a display of Richardson’s most recent dazzling series of C-prints, Pillars of Dawn, imagining desolate future landscapes where environmental conditions have crystallised every inch of a bleak and baleful terrain.

Magnificent and complex, Richardson’s work asks us to consider what our future might be like if we continue on our current trajectory of planetary pillaging and consumption, and why we have allowed ourselves to arrive at such a moment of global environmental crisis.

Artist Biography:

Kelly Richardson (b. 1972, Burlington, Ontario) studied for her undergraduate degree at the Ontario College of Art & Design and her masters degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. From 2003-2017 she resided in north east England where she was a Lecturer in Fine Arts at Newcastle University. She currently lives and works on Vancouver Island where she is Associate Professor in Visual Arts at the University of Victoria.

Recent one person exhibitions include SMoCA, CAG Vancouver, VOID Derry, Naturhistorisches Museum Wien and a major survey at the Albright-Knox. Her work has been selected for the Beijing, Busan, Canadian, Gwangju and Montréal biennales, as well as major moving image exhibitions internationally in recent years. Richardson’s work has been acquired by significant museum collections across the UK, USA and Canada, from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, SMoCA and Albright-Knox Art Gallery to the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Arts Council Collection England and Towner, Eastbourne.

Mariner 9 is presented in partnership with NEoN Digital Arts Festival.