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K E L LY
RICHARDSON THIS
ISLAND
EARTH
This Island Earth
From idyllic Eden to environment in peril, landscape has been a continual source of inspiration to
Kelly Richardson grounding her explorations in photography and video. Starting with her earliest
appropriations of horror movie landscapes in the Supernatural Series (2001–2004), Richardson’s
subsequent productions have developed into an increasingly ambitious cycle of single- and
multi-channel video installations. Rendered using state-of-the-art software that allows the artist
to create seamless montages of still images and animated graphics, her embrace of digital
media allows her to effectively combine cinema and landscape.
Her recent works Mariner 9, Orion Tide and The Last Frontier form an uneasy trilogy. Influenced
as much by her affection for Romantic painting as by the computer-generated imagery (CGI)
used in contemporary cinema and video games, Richardson’s latest work demonstrates a
peculiar fascination with the future. Where earlier video installations such as Exiles of the
Shattered Star (2006) were more evocative of the Romantic sublime embodied by the paintings
of John Martin (1789-1854) her recent works suggest a greater affinity with contemporary genre
films such as The Day After Tomorrow. Rather than depicting the end of the world however
she succeeds in evoking troubling futuristic environments.
Richardson uses cinema as a framing device. Rather than cut away from a location to show
dialogue or an action sequence, she focuses almost exclusively on the location itself. She
elevates the landscape to centre stage while collapsing our experience of time as a linear
progression. Her approach to cinema brings to mind the Möbius loop. We are invited to immerse
ourselves in each successive landscape but there is no defined beginning, middle or end.
No inciting incident. No conclusion.
Mariner 9, her most complex project to date is represented by a panoramic C-print depicting
an extraordinarily detailed rendering of a Martian landscape based on topographical data culled
from NASA and HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment at the University of
ORION
TIDE
Orion Tide, 2012–2013, single channel high-definition 16:9 video
installation with audio, edition of 5 + 2 AP, 20 minute loop
Arizona.1 The richly observed details in this extraterrestrial topography are uncanny but the
landscape itself is littered with the remains of various Mars missions, including Mariner 9 and
Curiousity among others. The image captures an unsettling discrepancy between our sense
of wonder and the comedown of realizing that we are staring at a cosmic junkyard.
Orion Tide depicts wave after wave of rockets launching into the night sky, their vapour trails
blooming over the remote desert landscape. The title connects the dramatic events unfolding
to the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPVC) a new class of spacecraft being developed by
NASA that is slated to begin operations in 2014.2 The Orion MPVC is an ambitious replacement
for the Apollo space exploration program with the long-term goal of leaving low Earth orbit and
reaching Mars. In the scene, the multi-rocket take-off suggests some form of mass evacuation,
a terrestrial exodus into space. Are the rockets being launched in response to a man-made or
natural catastrophe? The enigmatic circumstances are never explained.
The Last Frontier is just as ominous, depicting a single enormous dome set in a remote
mountainous terrain that could easily double as an alien world. Is the dome protecting an
unseen population from a hostile environment or containing some catastrophic nuclear or
cosmic force? Whether the dome represents a utopian habitat or a dangerous event horizon
remains unclear but we can readily imagine that the inhabitants within might well be the same
ones escaping in Orion Tide. We are left pondering this remote and mysterious environment.
Richardson excels at creating these densely layered environments. She spends an inordinate
amount of time rendering individual effects in different software platforms to get the atmosphere
and components just right. For instance, the landscape in Orion Tide is composed of a series of
nine still images shot in West Texas that have been stitched together and colour graded to
appear as if the landscape was shot during the last light of day. The sky was composed entirely
in Photoshop. The rockets were rendered using a combination of Lightwave and Turbulence
FD before everything was composited and colour graded in After Effects. Unlike Orion Tide,
THE LAST
FRONTIER
The Last Frontier, 2013, single channel high-definition 16:9 video
installation with audio, edition of 5 + 2 AP, 14 min 50 sec loop
the landscapes in Mariner 9 and The Last Frontier are entirely digitally produced using Terragen
a photorealistic scenery generating software. Multi-channel audio further enhances and
completes the illusion by providing a soundtrack for the explosive displacement of air and
the dull roar of rocket engines.3
While deploying many of the same effects used in cinema and gaming environments,
Richardson purposefully eschews story and plot, limiting narrative in favour of an immersive and
meditative flow. Despite this evacuation of narrative her futuristic trilogy evokes a deep sense
of ecological ruin: from the rockets abandoning the planet to the Martian scrap yard and finally
the desolate bio-dome. In this regard her themes parallel those prevalent in the speculative
science-fiction cinema of the early 1970s. Films such as Silent Running, Soylent Green and Z.P.G.
(for Zero Population Growth) were influenced by the nascent ecological movement and openly
hypothesized a bleak future based on fears of overpopulation and pollution. Silent Running for
instance centres on the fate of a space age Noah’s Ark preserving the last remnants of the
world’s forests after an ecological disaster.4
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 Montréal 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 Montréal, 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.
www.kellyrichardson.net
Richardson’s concerns parallel these prescient eco-minded motion pictures, but she achieves
her goals without the hindrance of unwieldy sets or a large cast and crew. She shrewdly
translates cinematic effects from black box to white cube, illuminating a haunting yet not quite
hopeless future.
— Ivan Jurakic
1. http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu.
2. http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/491544main_orion_book_web.pdf
3. Software and rendering details from e-mail correspondence with the artist.
4. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067756.
MARINER
9
Mariner 9, 2013, C-Print, Edition of 5 + 2 AP, 76 x 175 cm
SEASON
FOUR
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