my name is legion, for we are many
Legion
By Kelly Richardson
Albright-Knox Art Gallery
Buffalo, New York
February 16–June 9, 2013
As an exhibition title, Legion snugly fits around this collection of Kelly Richardson’s video works. Including ruined landscapes that nod to the morbidity of human relationships with nature and technological “reality,” her work addresses the marks of the human army that has scarred its way across the earth. However, “legion,” recalling both biblical demons and mass militant forces, reflects not the work, but the audience. Richardson affirms that as humans, we are the legion responsible for shaping the scenes set austerely in front of us.
Through works like Exiles of the Shattered Star (2006), Legion explores the contemporary human relationship with environmental detriment. A thirty-minute video projection of a too-green hillside filmed in the English Lake District, Exiles evokes the pleasantries of nature; sounds of birds and bullfrogs imbue the scene with life, evoking ecosystems and natural community. However, Richardson overlays this hillside lake with continuously falling, digitally rendered balls of fire reminiscent of meteoric acid rain.
Projected on a screen just big enough to encroach upon the human scale, Exiles typifies Richardson’s address of environmental misuse. Though they are installations, her projected pieces read more like cinematic screens, windows, or portals—firmly placing scenes in front of the audience. Richardson uses the prescriptive “What if . . .” of dystopian science fiction films to combat the eeriness of a hyperbolic hypothetical future with familiarity, gently leading viewers into sad acceptance of the state of the environment. Rather than making abrasive assertions designed to shock or blame, Richardson soberly levels with the audience, employing a dichotomy of doom and hope. The audience accepts the scenes of melancholy degeneration and understands that it is too late for anger. Knowing this, however, denies viewers satisfaction, and compels them to crave change. In front of these projections, their own shadows invade the image, and they confront the reality that they are part of the great army that has caused the depicted damage. However, a hopeful beam of light on a hilltop grants that the human legion also has power to rectify this injury.
This quiet, confrontational activism parallels Richardson’s updated notion of the sublime. In her works, the majesty of untouched nature is present only as a ghost behind a veil of devastation. This new sublime looks unlike the wild and uplifting grandeur of nineteenth-century landscapes. The viewer no longer soars off a cliff over a glorious river valley. Richardson instead places viewers on solid, damaged ground stretched out accessibly before them. Nature remains overwhelming, but the sublime landscape becomes like a picture of a great beast brought down by a horde of insects. Mariner 9 (2012), named after the 1971 spacecraft and set two hundred years in the future, blows sublimity out to Martian terrain. At first look, this scene could be a serene depiction of earthly mountains. Slowly, though, one recognizes the rusted wreckage of attempts at exploration beyond the sullied expanse of Earth; failed machines lay wasted in the vast orange, jagged landscape, or halfheartedly drone away under the surveillance of a sickly sun. Swathed by the sounds of a barren wind, one understands the enormity of the human potential for damage. Slowly, the viewer comes to accept the reference in the exhibition title; like the biblical demons, not only are we many, but we have the capacity to greedily corrupt everything we touch.
The gallery text addressed the notion of hyperreality, perceived through media and technology. Society is increasingly accepting of imitative, constructed “reality,” allowing the digitally rendered Mariner almost to be taken as more naturalistic than the pieces derived from actual footage. This new suspension of disbelief exemplifies how artifice has permeated contemporary life as the human-nature relationship continues to degrade. Be it Twilight Avenger (2008) radioactive deer, or the ghostly holographic trees of The Erudition (2010), Richardson’s insertion of “hyperreal” elements into layered “real” footage calls our attention back to the difference between realities, hypothesizing an all-too-close future in which nature is available only through artificiality. She creates a hyperreality of her own, various alternate dimensions overlain to culminate in an elegant comparison of two human environments—the natural and the virtual.
Apart from viewers’ shadows, the human image was absent in this exhibition. Despite this, the work of the human legion is arrestingly evident. Legion’s major themes come together tightly in The Sequel (2004), which subjects viewers to a full minute of a tire lying motionless in the road. The only movement in the otherwise static shot is a slow swaying of the weeds growing on the side of the road until, suddenly, the tire picks itself up and rolls out of the frame. Only then, realizing the shot is playing in reverse, do viewers notice the odd, unnatural movement of the weeds. The focus placed on the tire—a symbol of technology and industrialization—distracts us from the evidence in the natural environment that something is off. This piece poignantly echoes the regretful hindsight with which we understand—too late—that our focus on artifice and technology has been at the expense of our environmental awareness. Still, we are left with a dismal, but open, road.
Legion
By Kelly Richardson
Albright-Knox Art Gallery
Buffalo, New York
February 16–June 9, 2013
As an exhibition title, Legion snugly fits around this collection of Kelly Richardson’s video works. Including ruined landscapes that nod to the morbidity of human relationships with nature and technological “reality,” her work addresses the marks of the human army that has scarred its way across the earth. However, “legion,” recalling both biblical demons and mass militant forces, reflects not the work, but the audience. Richardson affirms that as humans, we are the legion responsible for shaping the scenes set austerely in front of us.
Through works like Exiles of the Shattered Star (2006), Legion explores the contemporary human relationship with environmental detriment. A thirty-minute video projection of a too-green hillside filmed in the English Lake District, Exiles evokes the pleasantries of nature; sounds of birds and bullfrogs imbue the scene with life, evoking ecosystems and natural community. However, Richardson overlays this hillside lake with continuously falling, digitally rendered balls of fire reminiscent of meteoric acid rain.
Projected on a screen just big enough to encroach upon the human scale, Exiles typifies Richardson’s address of environmental misuse. Though they are installations, her projected pieces read more like cinematic screens, windows, or portals—firmly placing scenes in front of the audience. Richardson uses the prescriptive “What if . . .” of dystopian science fiction films to combat the eeriness of a hyperbolic hypothetical future with familiarity, gently leading viewers into sad acceptance of the state of the environment. Rather than making abrasive assertions designed to shock or blame, Richardson soberly levels with the audience, employing a dichotomy of doom and hope. The audience accepts the scenes of melancholy degeneration and understands that it is too late for anger. Knowing this, however, denies viewers satisfaction, and compels them to crave change. In front of these projections, their own shadows invade the image, and they confront the reality that they are part of the great army that has caused the depicted damage. However, a hopeful beam of light on a hilltop grants that the human legion also has power to rectify this injury.
This quiet, confrontational activism parallels Richardson’s updated notion of the sublime. In her works, the majesty of untouched nature is present only as a ghost behind a veil of devastation. This new sublime looks unlike the wild and uplifting grandeur of nineteenth-century landscapes. The viewer no longer soars off a cliff over a glorious river valley. Richardson instead places viewers on solid, damaged ground stretched out accessibly before them. Nature remains overwhelming, but the sublime landscape becomes like a picture of a great beast brought down by a horde of insects. Mariner 9 (2012), named after the 1971 spacecraft and set two hundred years in the future, blows sublimity out to Martian terrain. At first look, this scene could be a serene depiction of earthly mountains. Slowly, though, one recognizes the rusted wreckage of attempts at exploration beyond the sullied expanse of Earth; failed machines lay wasted in the vast orange, jagged landscape, or halfheartedly drone away under the surveillance of a sickly sun. Swathed by the sounds of a barren wind, one understands the enormity of the human potential for damage. Slowly, the viewer comes to accept the reference in the exhibition title; like the biblical demons, not only are we many, but we have the capacity to greedily corrupt everything we touch.
The gallery text addressed the notion of hyperreality, perceived through media and technology. Society is increasingly accepting of imitative, constructed “reality,” allowing the digitally rendered Mariner almost to be taken as more naturalistic than the pieces derived from actual footage. This new suspension of disbelief exemplifies how artifice has permeated contemporary life as the human-nature relationship continues to degrade. Be it Twilight Avenger (2008) radioactive deer, or the ghostly holographic trees of The Erudition (2010), Richardson’s insertion of “hyperreal” elements into layered “real” footage calls our attention back to the difference between realities, hypothesizing an all-too-close future in which nature is available only through artificiality. She creates a hyperreality of her own, various alternate dimensions overlain to culminate in an elegant comparison of two human environments—the natural and the virtual.
Apart from viewers’ shadows, the human image was absent in this exhibition. Despite this, the work of the human legion is arrestingly evident. Legion’s major themes come together tightly in The Sequel (2004), which subjects viewers to a full minute of a tire lying motionless in the road. The only movement in the otherwise static shot is a slow swaying of the weeds growing on the side of the road until, suddenly, the tire picks itself up and rolls out of the frame. Only then, realizing the shot is playing in reverse, do viewers notice the odd, unnatural movement of the weeds. The focus placed on the tire—a symbol of technology and industrialization—distracts us from the evidence in the natural environment that something is off. This piece poignantly echoes the regretful hindsight with which we understand—too late—that our focus on artifice and technology has been at the expense of our environmental awareness. Still, we are left with a dismal, but open, road.