Kelly Richardson

Kelly Richardson (1972) is a Canadian artist working with digital technologies to create hyper-real landscapes.

Early life and education

Richardson was born August 2, 1972 in Burlington, Ontario, Canada. From 1994–1997, she studied at the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto. 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. In 2003, she moved to the United Kingdom taking up residence in the northeast where she also completed her masters at Newcastle University.

Career

Richardson works with video and digital photography to create hyper-real landscapes. 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.

In 2012, a 15-year retrospective exhibition of her work entitled 'Legion' was organised by and premiered at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in England. The retrospective then toured to the Grundy Art Gallery (UK), Towner (UK) and Albright-Knox Art Gallery (USA).

Biography

Selected exhibitions

• SMoCA, "Tales on the Horizon", Scottsdale, Arizona, USA (2015)
• Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, "Mariner 9", Vienna, Austria (2014)
• Albright-Knox Art Gallery, "Kelly Richardson: Legion" (retrospective), Eastbourne, UK (2013)
• Towner, "Legion" (retrospective), Eastbourne, UK (2013)
• Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, "Legion" (retrospective), Sunderland, UK (2012)
• Le Fresnoy, "Visions Fugitives", Tourcoing, France (2012)
• 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

• Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, USA
• Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
• Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• Arts Council Collection, England
• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, USA
• Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Montréal, Quebec, Canada
• National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada
• SMoCA, USA
• The Collection: NGCA, UK
• Towner, Eastbourne, UK