A slightly malfunctioning, holographic forest

 Kelly Richardson, Leviathan, 2011
Image courtesy of the artist and Birch Libralato
Originally commissioned by Artpace San Antonio
Photo credit: Colin Davison

Entering the Towner Gallery's exhibition, Kelly Richardson: Legion, you encounter this ominous landscape of dark trees and glowing water.  There are no natural sounds, only an eerie hum as if the whole place has been irradiated. The sickly yellow light ripples round the base of the trees, apparently emanating from somewhere underwater.  Mondrian used a similar composition for his Woods near Oele (1908), but the yellow light between the trees in his painting comes from the sun and symbolises in Theosophy ideas of enlightenment.  The meaning of Leviathan is obscure - it seems quite appropriate that the artist filmed it in Texas at Caddo Lake, near the town of Uncertain.  Her unsettling works do not tend to reference particular places, even when they are easily identifiable (the Lake District, for example, in Exiles of the Shattered Star (2006), which is seemingly being rained on by asteroids like the ones we recently saw streaking across the skies of Siberia). Leaving Leviathan, you walk into a forest of hanging video screens showing footage of sunlit woodlands.  It looks at first like a sylvan idyll, but the soundscape feels increasingly at odds with the images. Richardson has called this work The Great Destroyer, a reference to humanity.  The incongruous sounds are made by a lyrebird, imitating the noise of a chain saw, a car alarm and gunshots.

The third piece in the exhibition, Twilight Avenger (2008), has been described in an article by David Jager, 'Kelly Richardson: The Radiant Real.  'A magnificent stag appears, preens and begins to graze in a forest at dusk. The stag, however, is phosphorescent green and wrapped in a writhing emerald vapour. The forest, a painterly composite of several different natural locations, has been digitally enhanced to a luxurious degree, and the scene is punctuated by a soundtrack replete with crickets’ chirps and animal rustlings. What is most confounding about this eye-popping paean to pastoral kitsch is how it manages to be remotely believable at all'.  A vision of a stag in a woodland sounds like it should hark back to folklore and legend, but this creature looks like it could have wandered in from a Harry Potter film.  It is the same unnatural colour as the green screens used in chroma key compositing, but when it moves out of shot you realise that the still, empty forest it inhabits is no more real than the stag.

The Erudition is the final work in the exhibition, a vision of the future in which the ghosts of trees flicker on and off in a barren landscape.  In a recent interview, the artist explains how she 'wanted to create a large, slightly malfunctioning, holographic forest ... The landscapes were shot in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Southern Alberta during a residency with the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and then highly manipulated to control the colour, light, mood and importantly to the idea, to remove all signs of humanity. Months were then dedicated to learning two new software programs to create the holopads and holographic trees which appeared to be blowing in a fictional wind. All of the individual components which make up the images were then composited together to produce the final works. From start to finish The Erudition took about a year and a half to see to completion.'  One reviewer has described the result as resembling a forgotten site for some proposed extraterrestrial colonisation.  'Richardson produces a future-world that was, now not so much remembered as stored in the dull chill of a multi-terabyte hard-drive: gone, forgotten, but forever clickable.'

Kelly Richardson, The Erudition, 2010
Image courtesy of the artist and Birch Libralato
Photo credit: Colin Davison