Kelly Richardson - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Kelly Richardson is an artist

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

whose media-based practice focuses on the idea of mixed realities; part 'real', part fantasy.

Early life and education

Richardson was born in Burlington, Ontario

Burlington, Ontario

Burlington , is a city located in Halton Region at the western end of Lake Ontario. Burlington is part of the Greater Toronto Area, and is also included in the Hamilton Census Metropolitan Area. Physically, Burlington lies between the north shore of Lake Ontario and the Niagara Escarpment...

and at the age of 6 was relocated to Guelph, Ontario

Guelph, Ontario

Guelph is a city in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. Known as "The Royal City", Guelph is roughly east of Waterloo and west of downtown Toronto at the intersection of Highway 6 and Highway 7. It is the seat of Wellington County, but is politically independent of it...

where she grew up, later attending high school at the Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute

Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute

The Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute is a public high school located in the city of Guelph, Ontario, Canada...

. From 1994–1997, she studied at the Ontario College of Art & Design

Ontario College of Art & Design

OCAD University is Canada's largest and oldest educational institution for art and design. It is located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on McCaul Street beside the Art Gallery of Ontario...

in Toronto

Toronto

Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...

, Canada where she continued to reside practicing and exhibiting both nationally and internationally at various venues including Hallwalls

Hallwalls

Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center is a non-profit organization in Buffalo, N.Y. that showcases artists of diverse backgrounds in film, video, literature, music, performance, media and visual arts. Since its inception, Hallwalls has been dedicated to promoting artists from multiple backgrounds and...

, Mercer Union

Mercer Union

Mercer Union is an artist-run centre in Toronto, Ontario, established in 1979 to exhibit contemporary art.In 2009, the gallery moved to the Bloor and Lansdowne area in Toronto's west end. Previously the gallery had held homes at 29 Mercer Street , 439 King Street West, 333 Adelaide St...

, Art Gallery of Ontario

Art Gallery of Ontario

Under the direction of its CEO Matthew Teitelbaum, the AGO embarked on a $254 million redevelopment plan by architect Frank Gehry in 2004, called Transformation AGO. The new addition would require demolition of the 1992 Post-Modernist wing by Barton Myers and Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg...

and Centre Georges Pompidou

Centre Georges Pompidou

Centre Georges Pompidou is a complex in the Beaubourg area of the 4th arrondissement of Paris, near Les Halles, rue Montorgueil and the Marais...

. In 2002, she relocated to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada for her Master of Fine Arts in Media Studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University

Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University

NSCAD University also known as the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, is a post-secondary art school located in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada....

. In 2003, she moved to the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

taking up residence in the northeast where she also completed her masters at Newcastle University.

Career

Kelly Richardson's practice centres around video and photography which often employs a high standard of special effect, mixing real footage with digitally constructed elements. Her work "adopts the use of cinematic language to investigate notions of constructed environments and the blurring of the real versus the unreal. She creates contemplative spaces which offer visual metaphors for the sensations associated with the hugely complicated world we have created for ourselves, magnificent and equally dreadful." As David Jager noted in Canadian Art magazine,

Richardson deploys a formidable range of techniques and a broad palette of approaches in her creation of a new aesthetic, one that elicits a euphoric suspension of disbelief, allowing viewers to delve into the increasingly ambiguous and complex juncture between the real and the represented. She has transformed video, once a self-consciously minimal, anti-cinematic, bare-bones practice, into something much richer, and much stranger.

She has exhibited widely throughout the world including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery

Albright-Knox Art Gallery

The Albright-Knox Art Gallery is an art museum located in Delaware Park in Buffalo, New York. The gallery is a major showplace for modern art and contemporary art. It is located directly across the street from Buffalo State College.-History:...

, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum beside the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., the United States. The museum was initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It was designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft and is part of the...

for The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image, the Sundance Film Festival

Sundance Film Festival

The Sundance Film Festival is a film festival that takes place annually in Utah, in the United States. It is the largest independent cinema festival in the United States. Held in January in Park City, Salt Lake City, and Ogden, as well as at the Sundance Resort, the festival is a showcase for new...

(in 2009 and again in 2011) and she has represented Canada in the Gwangju Biennale

Gwangju Biennale

The Gwangju Biennale, which started in September 1995 in the city of Gwangju in the South Jeolla province of South Korea, was Asia's first contemporary art biennale. The purpose of Gwangju Biennale is globalization of art and it respect diversity rather than uniformity...

, Busan Biennale and the first Beijing 798 Biennale.

In 2011, she was long listed for the British Northern Art Prize. She was also long listed for the Sobey Art Award

Sobey Art Award

The Sobey Art Award is Canada's largest prize for young Canadian artists. It is named after Canadian businessperson and art collector Frank H. Sobey, who established The Sobey Art Foundation...

two years running in 2008 and 2009. Also in 2009, she was selected as the featured artist for the Americans for the Arts

Americans for the Arts

Americans for the Arts is a nonprofit organization whose primary focus is advancing the arts in the United States. With offices in Washington, D.C. and New York City, it has a record of more than 50 years of service...

National Art Awards where she was honoured alongside Ed Ruscha, Robert Redford

Robert Redford

Charles Robert Redford, Jr. , better known as Robert Redford, is an American actor, film director, producer, businessman, environmentalist, philanthropist, and founder of the Sundance Film Festival. He has received two Oscars: one in 1981 for directing Ordinary People, and one for Lifetime...

and Salman Rushdie. Kelly Richardson was featured in the fall 09 issue of Canadian Art magazine as one of "10 artists setting the pace of contemporary art".

Selected exhibitions

Albright-Knox, "Videosphere: A New Generation", Buffalo, New York (2011)
Artpace, "Leviathan", San Antonio, Texas (2011)
Art Gallery of Ontario, "Sculpture as Time: Major works. New Acquisitions", Toronto, Canada (2010)
Sundance Film Festival, New Frontier on Main, Park City, Utah, USA (2009)
Beijing 798 Biennale, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Beijing, China (2009)
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image, Washington, DC, USA (2008)
Busan Biennale, Expenditure, Busan, South Korea (2008)
HALLWALLS, The Edge of Everything, Buffalo, New York, USA (2008)
Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, Exiles of the Shattered Star, Montreal, Quebec, Canada (2007)
Gwangju Biennale, A grain of dust, a drop of water, Busan, South Korea (2004)

Public collections

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, USA
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, USA
Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Montréal, Quebec, Canada
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Videos and video installations

1997, Jell-o (single-channel video, loop, 4:3)
1998, Glow (single-channel video, loop, 4:3)
2001, Camp (single-channel video, 2 minute loop, 4:3)
2001, There's a lot There (single-channel video, 2 minute loop, 4:3)
2001, A car stopped at a stopsign, in the middle of nowhere, in front of a landscape (single-channel video, 30 minute loop, 4:3)
2002, howthedevil (single-channel video, seamless loop, 4:3)
2004, The Sequel (single-channel video, 1 minute loop, 4:3)
2005, Ferman Drive (single-channel video, 1 minute 20 second loop, 4:3)
2006, Exiles of the Shattered Star (single-channel high definition video, 30 minute loop, 16:9)
2007, The Great Destroyer (multi-channel high definition video, 15 minute loop)
2007, Wagons Roll (originally produced in 2003 and remade in 2007, single-channel video, 24 minute loop, 16:9)
2007, Forest Park (dual-channel high definition video, 18 minute loop, 16:9)
2008, Twilight Avenger (single-channel high definition video, 5 minute 40 second loop, 16:9)
2010, The Erudition (single/triple-channel high definition video, 20 minute loop, 16:9)
2011, Leviathan (single/triple-channel high definition video, 20 minute loop, 16:9)

External links

Birch Libralato, gallery representation in Toronto