Kelly Richardson

Kelly Richardson (born August 2, 1972 in Burlington, Ontario, Canada) is an artist whose media-based practice focuses on the idea of mixed realities; part 'real', part fantasy.

Contents

Early life and education

Richardson was born in Burlington, Ontario and at the age of 6 was relocated to Guelph, Ontario where she grew up, later attending high school at the Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute. From 1994–1997, she studied at the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto, Canada where she continued to reside practicing and exhibiting both nationally and internationally at various venues including Hallwalls, Mercer Union, Art Gallery of Ontario and Centre Georges Pompidou. 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

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."[1] As David Jager noted in Canadian Art magazine,[2]

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, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden for The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image, the Sundance Film Festival (in 2009 and again in 2011) and she has represented Canada in the Gwangju Biennale, 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 two years running in 2008 and 2009.[3] Also in 2009, she was selected as the featured artist for the Americans for the Arts National Art Awards where she was honoured alongside Ed Ruscha, Robert Redford and Salman Rushdie.[4] Kelly Richardson was featured in the fall 09 issue of Canadian Art magazine as one of "10 artists setting the pace of contemporary art".[5]

Biography

Selected exhibitions

Public collections

Videos and video installations

External links

Further reading

References

  1. ^ *Pace Digital Gallery
  2. ^ *Jager, David. "Kelly Richardson: The Radiant Real". Canadian Art Magazine. http://www.canadianart.ca/art/features/2009/09/01/kelly-richardson/. Retrieved 2009-11-12. 
  3. ^ *Sobey Art Award
  4. ^ *Americans for the Arts National Arts Awards
  5. ^ *Jager, David. "Kelly Richardson: The Radiant Real". Canadian Art Magazine. http://www.canadianart.ca/art/features/2009/09/01/kelly-richardson/. Retrieved 2009-11-12.