CBC As It Happens
Interview about Metallica: 72 Seasons (April 7, 2023)

CBC As It Happens interviewed Kelly Richardson and Setta Studio (Director, Tim Saccenti and curator, Dina Chang) about the inclusion of her art in Metallica’s title track music video for 72 Seasons, and worldwide cinema screening.

“Aside from being longtime fans of her work, we both felt Kelly’s pieces had a particular kind of monumental grandeur, a sense of awe, that mirrored the sonically heavy sound of Metallica,” Saccenti said in an email. “There’s a primal unease to her pieces that cuts to your core.”

I’ve always been concerned with our understanding and by extension, our appreciation of the natural world in relation to constructed environments where truth is often difficult to locate. For decades, we’ve “understood” the world through screens which offer a complete disconnect from our relationship to the natural systems which sustain us. I have serious concerns that over time, we’re diluting our appreciation through this rupture, further amplifying generational amnesia when we desperately need to be moving in the opposite direction.

Richardson points out the hubris in our fantasy of human specialness, our refusal to acknowledge we’re simply one of many species within the world’s astonishing web of life, and our denial that whatever we do to the environment, we do to ourselves as well. Richardson courts irony by turning the same digital media that potently enables our detachment from the natural world into a powerful tool for examining the myth of endless growth driving humanity’s misguided labours toward a catastrophic future.

Are you sitting down? A recent World Wildlife Fund report states that between 1970 and 2010, the world lost 52% of its biodiversity. As income inequality increases, the alarming destruction of plant and animal life accelerates. Our economic structure is predicated on a system that serves the few by exploiting everybody and everything else. Many people believe we’re in the midst of a mass extinction and we urgently need to adjust our relationship to the nature. The pessimists among us, think it’s too late.

The most important aspect of Richardson’s practice is how she takes both the most powerful parts of painting and its failures and transforms them into something on the edge of the ineffable. Her works become entities just above our heads, but forever in our minds… a portal for the viewer to step into as the room transforms into a theatre of the mind.

Richardson’s work illuminates the consequent existential crisis for humanity. In her meditation on present and future destruction, she encourages us to face an end where narrative has disappeared – where the human experience, and story, is over, and where reality is confined to moments on a loop. She does this so hypnotically and carefully that the effect is profound…