|
Kelly Richardson's work appears simple, but it makes me ruminate
on primal things.
Often modest in scale and execution, her materials are often acutely
banal: beer caps, broken drumsticks, used corks, old concert T-shirts.
Her images are brief and concise: the moon at night, undulating red
jello, a stop sign in the middle of a desert. The detritus and the
ordinary. A motley and mundane assemblage. And a deceptive simplicity.
Her sculptural works appear to verge upon the territory of the one-liner:
corks carved into canoes; broken drumsticks tenderly rebuilt with
cork, thousands of beer caps glued together to form a six foot high
tower; old concert T-shirts in a pile. Richardson creates her sculptures
from objects retrieved and collected from the real world - they are
what they are and she does very little to transform them. But the
slight transformative touches which are subtly applied to these mundane
objects move them beyond one-linerland into a persistent river of
sensations.
Longing, desire, aspiration. That these sensations be embodied in
not only mundane, but often modestly-sized artworks, is not an ironic
device. It is the implementation of a microcosmic model. Richardson
recognizes that scale need not dictate the impact of the work and
that the universe can be located in small packages or slight moments.
A full-scale canoe carved from cork might be impressive, but a discreet
pile of hand-carved corks is more emotionally charged, even if the
emotion is an anxious sigh. The gesture of rebuilding a drumstick
is a tender and futile gesture, a desire to relive the glorious moment
of impact when it broke in the first place.
Richardson's sculptures depict a querulous modularity, a re-integration
of like things into new forms. Her beer cap Tower does not
simply itemize how many beers the artist served in her job as a bartender,
or else she would have built a beer bottle and had herself photographed
beside it for Bartender's Monthly. Instead, Richardson has
constructed a hollow tower, twisting slightly through its own torque.
Glittering and bright, it is the endless upward stagger of aspiration,
Richardson's shining city on the hill.
|
|
Desire and longing are big, fat cosmic sensations, primal things,
and Richardson's two video works bookend these ideas with contrived
and real images of universal import. Jello is a nonstop loop
of jiggling, red jello, but with the image in full-bleed on the screen,
it seems a seething bloody swirl of primordial ooze, the fiery birth
of the universe, full of violent, beautiful desire. In Camp,
a still shot of the full moon at night is distorted visually and interrupted
aurally by the crackling snap of popcorn. The heat from the campfire
off-screen gently mutates the shape of the moon and the sound of jiffypop
speaks with an inarticulate but passionate crackle.
If these sensations sound too broad for the work described, consider
that many of Richardson's works are equally deft: a photograph of
two bubbles floating over the city, a pencil-crayon drawing of a world
ringed by rainbows, or a polaroid photograph of an image from a B-movie.
The polaroid shows the back of a car in the midst of a barren desert,
stopped, strangely enough, at a stop sign. This image, as much as
any other work, contains traces of Richardson's ubiquitous "It."
And "It" is not the meaning of life. It is the sensation
of life: simultaneously absurd, hilarious, beautiful, sad, hopeful,
futile, exciting, pathetic.
I heard tell recently of a woman who was born on a hill and I wondered
what that might be like, what kind of person that would create. I
think you would be forever imbued with an acute sense of the ever
present slippage of life and compensate with a burning desire and
a nonstop sense of aspiration. You would be filled with urgency. You
would recognize the inherent absurdity of life. You would exhibit
an impulse to not simply endure, but prevail.
John Massier
|