KELLY RICHARDSON: HAUNTED
CURATED BY GREGORY MCCARTNEY
EXHIBITION OPENING & LAUNCH OF 10TH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE OF ABRIDGED – FRIDAY 11 APRIL FROM 7PM.
FREE BUS Runs on evening of event from Golden Thread Gallery Belfast – Departs 7pm & returns from Portadown at 8.45pm. To book a space contact geraldine@millenniumcourt.org
Millennium Court Arts Centre (Portadown), VOID Gallery (Derry~Londonderry) and Abridged Magazine presents Haunted, a dual exhibition by Kelly Richardson, curated by Gregory McCartney. Part One launches in April at MCAC Portadown and Part Two will be forthcoming at VOID, Derry. The exhibition is accompanied by a special 10th anniversary edition of Abridged.
Richardson’s work offers potential alternative futures in which the landscape becomes something alien and uncertain, beautiful but perhaps subtly vengeful. Referencing science fiction and the apocalyptic sublime she creates potentialities in which progress has perhaps failed, testified by the flickering holographic trees of The Erudition, or taken a completely new evolutionary path.
The works in MCAC could be considered as the end-game of humanity’s exploitation and exhaustion of the natural world or they could be the start of a new evolution, a new hybridisation of the scientific and natural; most likely the former has caused the latter. Science creates its own fictions and progress isn’t always benign; progression inherently carries within it obsolescence and atrophy. Ideas and ideals are thrown by the wayside.
Landscape is in the end a form of portraiture and we get the feeling that that the populous of The Erudition and Orion Tide are in trouble. They might be erudite but erudition doesn’t necessarily equate with wisdom. These eco-systems are haunted; memory and precognition, remembrance and revelation frame everything. The artist combines technical virtuosity with an apocalyptic sensibility resulting in works subtle and at once vast in their scope. They exist not only in the tradition of artists’ film and video but also in that of landscape painting; in the same sphere as Turner and John Martin in their creation of abstract, epic landscapes full of storm and revelation but also delicate and beautiful. Richardson gives us a glimpse of a future here. It is up to us to decide what to do next.
Abridged aims to commission and publish contemporary/experimental poetry and to initiate contemporary art exhibitions. We encourage poets/artists to investigate the articulation of ‘Abridged’ themes. These themes focus on contemporary concerns in a rapidly changing society. We are offering an alternative and complete integration of poetry, art and design. 0 – 10: Haunted includes artwork by Kelly Richardson and poetry from leading Irish and international poets.
