12 Jan 2008 to 16 Feb 2008
Gallery Hours : Tu-F 11-6 : Sa 1-4, Su, M Closed
Opening: Saturday, Jan 12, 2008, 8—11pm
Hallwalls Contempoary Arts Center
341 Delaware Ave
NY 14202
Buffalo, NY
New York
North America
p: 716-854-194
m:
f: 716-854-1696
w: www.hallwalls.org/index.html
UK-based Canadian artist Kelly Richardson’s single channel video work focuses on the resolution of the sublime from ordinary or flawed moments, amassing an accumulation of often conflicting sensations. Richardson is interested in creating comtemplative spaces of rapturous visual allure, loaded with double meaning and exploring the simultaneity of the magnificent and the dreadful. Cinematic language is used as a means of concocting landscapes that are part real, part imagined, a hybrid reality that accentuates and questions our ambiguous place in the world. There are no other protagonists in Richardson’s work, other than perhaps Time itself. Even within scenes where one might expect a human figure, none are evident. Instead, Richardson is enfolding the viewer into successive imaginary spaces within which the essential ingredients are simultaneity of action and sensation. Action—even when limited—repeats forever. Sensation—borne of repeated action and a seductive, engrossing image—blossoms to fill and expand the moment. There is no single endpoint to this heady blend of elements—Richardson’s works evoke the complex and contradictory sensation of life: anxious, hilarious, ominous, rapturous. The edge of everything is the springboard from which Richardson hurls her work and the viewer into the ether of possibility.
MEGAN GREENE: Rappaccini’s Daughter
Megan Greene's detailed drawings on black paper combine the forms of flora, feathers, hair and jewelry in manners Baroque and tribal. The careful topiary-like displays of such feminine ornaments both heighten and belie their frivolity, appearance of purpose and fetishistic quality. Greene's work shows her interest in mammals, birds, deep-sea creatures and insects to an effect reminiscent of Victorian naturalist drawings. These organic elements become ghostly, hermaphroditic and ornamental. In each drawing, the strange composite of such components suggests themes transcendent of each literal part: of elegance and delicacy mixed with the macabre, of body parts and biological specimen through the incarnation of the prehistoric and futuristic, and of cultural artifact, be it headdress or totem. The subject of these drawings lies in the intentionally ambiguous interplay of these various qualities. Ultimately, the works may be about that state of ambiguity itself, serving as icons that reiterate a perpetual state of becoming. Like the plants described in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story Rappaccini’s Daughter. “their gorgeousness seemed fierce, passionate, and even unnatural...”
