Kelly Richardson
This Island Earth
Gallery One + Two
Exhibition Info
Kelly Richardson draws on science-fiction cinema, literature and the history of landscape painting as inspiration. Her video installations and photographic artworks interweave fine art, animation and computer generated imagery with footage of the natural wilderness, to create highly sophisticated and immersive works that have been rendered over many months. In keeping with her interest in cinema and science fiction, This Island Earth collects recent works Orion Tide, The Last Frontier, and a panoramic print of Mariner 9. Each of these futuristic environments depicts a man-made or ecological catastrophe. As dystopian landscapes they share a ‘calculated ambiguity’ that makes them at once arresting and unsettling, evoking aspects of the romantic sublime. Can humankind persevere in the face of cosmic forces or abandon the planet in some form of mass exodus? Richardson’s work invites us to ponder the unknowable.
Photography: Robert McNair
Artist Biography
Kelly Richardson received her MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and Newcastle University and studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Her work has been exhibited at the Beijing, Gwangju and Busan biennales, TIFF and Sundance Film Festival, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Centre Pompidou, Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Richardson’s works are represented in the collections of Towner, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, National Gallery of Canada, Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and Art Gallery of Ontario. She is based in North East, England where she has lived and worked for the last decade. Kelly Richardson is represented by Birch Contemporary, Toronto.