SELECTED INTERVIEWS

Kelly Richardson and Metallica: 72 Seasons

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.”

Kelly Richardson: Creating Potential Futures

Niio Art
Interview with Pau Waelder (April 10, 2022)

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.

5 Questions to Kelly Richardson

Marta Herford Blog
Interview with Marta Herford (2021)

In the Marta exhibition “Deceptive Images”, the relationship between artefact and document becomes blurred when we enter into the constructed world of Kelly Richardson’s video work. It blurs – backed by sound – the separating line between reality and fiction. In this interview, the artist answers our questions.

SELECTED ARTICLES

Kelly Richardson

Galleries West
Lyn Richards (March 21, 2022)

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.

Embers and the Giants

York Mediale Blog
George Vasey (2021)

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.

Silvery Perfection

Photomonitor | Seaton Delaval Hall
Helen James (2018)

The fear of losing wilderness and a belief in wilderness preservation is an international concern, in the western world at least, and this digitally styled, fictional work suits these digital times as much as Adams’ approach in analogue days gone by. Both prophetic and reflective, this work reminds us how important it is for our visual delight to be awakened so that we engage with the notion of landscape through image in thoughtful ways about more than one place.

Claire Scherzinger on Kelly Richardson

Painters on Painting
Claire Scherzinger

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.

The Weather Makers

Studio International | DCA
Christiana Spens

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…

Tales on the Horizon

The Arts Beacon | SMoCA
Grant Vetter

Richardson’s images make the hysteria of the present a little more bearable, and the threat of the sublime a little more comprehensible, or at least accessible to contemporary experience in a way that is on par with the very best artists from the enlightenment, romanticism, modernism and post-modernism…

Shadows from the Future

Honest Ulsterman
Carmen Victor

Kelly Richardson, a Canadian artist living and working in the northeast of England produces large-scale, cinematic videos that are associated with the 18th century notion of the sublime. Primarily through theorists such as Longinus, Edmund Burke and Kant, the idea of the sublime…

Haunted

Studio International | VOID Gallery
Darran Anderson

In John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, we are presented with the age-old story of the fall of man; partially due to satanic influence, partially due to our own temptations. What saves Milton’s work from sermonising is not just his poetry, but his acute awareness of moral ambiguity and complexity…

Kelly Richardson

ARTFORUM
Lauren Dyer Amazeen

Kelly Richardson’s uncannily evocative works are as haunting as they are beautiful. The UK-based Canadian artist works meticulously with advanced digital technology, interwoven with dramatic natural wilderness landscapes, to construct intricate imagery that projects a dystopian future in which shadowy technological developments…

Legion

Photomonitor | Towner
Paul Carey-Kent

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek criticises the liberal view of ecology as something harmonious which we threaten to disturb through our effect on the environment. He does so on the grounds that nature has always contained a great deal of destruction and it makes little sense…

Kelly Richardson and Blockbuster Realism

cgwtf, 2012
Alan Warburton

Why don’t more artists play with this intoxicating substance? Well, few artists have the time, money or skill to explore this language. What’s more, artists are creative explorers, and making hyperreal CG is also not a naturally exploratory process – results are not immediate, and it’s hard to replicate the malleability of a painting in progress.

Legion, Mariner 9, Orion Tide

Journal for Wild Culture
Tom Jeffreys

If the stillness instilled in a landscape suggests a sense of permanence, then it’s an impression subtly strengthened by the presence of the sea. As scattered children play on the wide expanse of sand at Whitley Bay, a scrap of wrapper flits raggedly by, and the sea stretches out, blue-grey towards the distant sun…

This Island Earth

UWAG
Ivan Jurakic

From idyllic Eden to environment in peril, landscape has been a continual source of inspiration to Kelly Richardson grounding her explorations in digital photography and video. Starting with her earliest appropriations of horror movie landscapes in the Supernatural Series (2001-2004)…

Leviathan

Artpace San Antonio
Heather Pessanti

The metamorphic potential of art to transform space can render it a sublime physical and perceptive experience.  Such altered worlds can be found in the melancholic terrains of Kelly Richardson, whose projected video installations channel exterior and interior landscapes into a new experiential space…

Kelly Richardson: Mariner 9

Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy
Hans Rainer Sepp

This phenomenological analysis of the video installation Mariner 9 made by the Canadian artist Kelly Richardson in 2012 will gain a basic concept of the virtual. It will be realized by three preparing steps and a final conclusion. First, it will be shown in which way the experiencing of Richardson’s…