Quay Animation Studios News and Updates

Art Gallery of Nova Scotia
Forces of Nature
April 11 - May 31, 2009

As I watched the water seeping through the concrete floor outside our main temporary exhibition space, it struck me- there is no controlling Nature. Water in an art gallery is a dangerous thing and as the spring thaw approached, a hard decision had to be made: as Nature couldn’t be trusted to stay out of our Gallery spaces, the exhibition of historical prints, paintings and decorative arts from the National Gallery, Lord Dalhousie: Patron and Collector had to be postponed. Well, if Nature was going to be so present in the Art Gallery, it became clear that it must be on display. In Forces of Nature, an exhibition designed to be waterproof, four video works, drawn primarily from the Gallery’s permanent collection, examine artists’ relationships to the natural world.

David Askevold, Katherine Knight, Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, along with Kelly Richardson have created works of art that explore mediation, danger, and seduction in both natural and constructed land and seascapes.

David Askevold’s meditative projection, Latrajarg (The Cliff), follows seagulls on a cliff, and provides an exploration of figure and ground. In this early video work Askevold creates a contemplative work of art, delighting in the sea, light and motion created by the birds against sea. In the same way, Katherine Knight layers sound and video in a hypnotic nautical portrait in her work Buoy. Beacons to sailors, the buoys of Knight’s work call to us, their mournful cries almost swallowed by the ever-present sound of the ocean. Knight photographed these buoys in Caribou Harbour, near Pictou, NS, but as the three channel video work bobs, dips and ebbs before your eyes, the scene transcends place and makes a mariner of any viewer.

Emily Vey Duke + Cooper Battersby delve the highs and lows of human of nature in their most recent work, Beauty Plus Pity. Their exploration of innocence, good and evil and the human relationship to the natural world is offered in compiled vignettes and animated stories told through a varied cast, including hunters, young children, and God. In Kelly Richardson’s Twilight Avenger, an eerie green glow engulfs a stag in a twinkling forest landscape… Or perhaps that glow is emanating from the stag. That constructed tension is part of the compelling mystery of Richardson’s work. Richardson has digitally manipulated this bucolic scene, adding twilight, mist, the hoot of owls to trees and grass from different forests. She blurs the real and the surreal, allowing an uneasy vision forest life.

Screening
KELLY RICHARDSON
TWILIGHT AVENGER
MARCH 6–APRIL 26
OPENING RECEPTION
FRIDAY, MARCH 6, 6–10pm

Equal parts sci-fi myth and forest fable, dreamy nocturne and dazzling special effect—Kelly Richardson’s Twilight Avenger begins with a fairytale-worthy image of a misty, moonlit forest clearing inhabited by a majestic stag who emanates a luminous green vapour. Quietly grazing amidst the ambient chatter of other forest dwellers (the hoot of an owl may portend an imminent threat) our protagonist occasionally rears his head, shifting his gaze towards us.

Like much of Richardson’s work, Twilight Avenger poses multiple questions amidst its calculated ambiguities. The scene is at once visually convincing and obviously synthetic, peaceful and disquieting, shifting between stillness and action. As the scene unfolds, questions remain whether the protagonist is some sort of forest sentinel, as the title implies, or perhaps a victim of a man-made mishap.

Ultimately, Richardson leaves such questions unanswered, leveraging our belief in the visual document with the evocative power of the imaginary. Through painstaking application of digital effects to documentary images (Richardson filmed the deer and landscape elements in Canada and England respectively) she invites us to question the integrity of images and perhaps ask viewers to consider our increasingly mediated relationship with nature.

Canadian-born multimedia artist Kelly Richardson lives and works in the UK. With MFA studies in media-arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2003, she has since exhibited internationally at venues including the Busan Biennale (Korea), Hallwalls (USA), Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art (UK) and the 2004 Gwangju Biennale. Most recently, her work was featured in The Cinema Effect; Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and at the Sundance Film Festival.

Her work is represented in the public collections of the Albright Knox Gallery (Buffalo), Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

Screening is dedicated to the presentation of innovative, challenging and exciting moving images. Screening will exhibit works exploring the ways moving image culture influences how we see ourselves and others.

located just inside Vox Populi Gallery
319 N 11th 3rd floor Philadelphia PA 19107
W-Su 12-6pm Free For more info 267.918.8151
http://www.screeningvideo.org/

The Sundance Film Festival 2009 has officially kicked off! Included in this years festival is Twilight Avenger, a video artwork which Quay Animation Studios recently collaborated on with artist Kelly Richardson. Installation footage of the New Frontier exhibition (featuring Twilight Avenger) below is compliments of Robert Hirschi/The Salt Lake Tribune.

Nature’s calling
KELLY RICHARDSON QUESTIONS WHAT’S REAL
DAVID JAGER

It’s hard to pinpoint what’s so unnerving in Kelly Richardson’s video and photographic work at Birch Libralato. It could be the way the unnatural is continually made to appear natural.

While it might seem that Richardson is making a statement about the colonization of nature by technology, her environments are themselves highly constructed, artificial affairs.

In Twilight Avenger, the most arresting piece in the show, a magnificent stag preens in a forest, evades the camera and finally allows itself to be seen grazing before it trots off into the wild. The background, however, is a meticulously recreated com posite of several forests put to gether with painterly care. The stag itself is a bright phosphorescent green, surrounded by a writhing cloud of greenish vapour.

This painstaking frame-by-frame animation belies the almost convincing natural setting and leaves us to wonder, Is the green stag real or a CGI creature worthy of a summer blockbuster?

In Wagon’s Roll, another video installation, a car’s jump off a cliff is curiously undramatic. The wheels continue to spin as it hangs frozen in mid-air. Richardson’s surreal suspension of this cliché of filmic action makes us wonder what, if anything, will happen next.

This sense of anticipation and dislocation is part of what she’s aiming for in subverting the narratives Holly wood has conditioned us to expect.

Her photos, many of them stills from earlier video projects, also generate a feeling of uneasiness. There’s always a sense of something gone slightly awry – on more than one level.

The work suggests that as we alienate ourselves from nature, we might also be losing our ability to directly experience the unmediated world.