The Erudition (installation view, extended version)

Kelly Richardson
'The Erudition', 2010

High definition video with sound
Duration: 20 min loop
Three channel projection
Aspect ratio: 16:9, PAL
Installation dimensions: 49' x 9'

Installation view at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery

Mining the aesthetics of cinema and science fiction, The Erudition presents a lunar-esque looking landscape with what appears to be an unlikely monument or proposal, consisting of holographic trees blowing in fictional wind. Is this slightly malfunctioning display a forgotten site for proposed colonization? Better yet, is this some kind of alien artwork?

"Richardson's contribution to the genre is both a technical virtuosity and a nerdy ambivalence that doesn’t critique our mediated world so much as take it as a given. As trees flicker and crackle in and out of frame, there's a sense of a very distant future trying, in its techno-sterile way, to recreate virtually something it never actually knew. 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." Murray Whyte, Toronto Star