Gary Michael Dault
The Globe and Mail
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Stars fall in the Bible - in Revelations, Chapter 9, for example ("The fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star from the sky which had fallen to the earth...") and they fall in popular songs (Stars Fell on Alabama, Catch A Falling Star, etc.), but they don't fall much into contemporary art.
Which is why Kelly Richardson's video projection, Exiles of the Shattered Star, now at Toronto's Birch Libralato Gallery, is so memorable. What makes it even more memorable is the degree to which the artist - a Canadian living and working in Newcastle, England - has carefully managed to keep this highly poetic work from becoming overly poetic.
It would have been easy enough. The high-definition video consists of a sustained view of a pastoral vista in England's Lake District (you can scarcely utter the phrase without thinking of Wordsworth and Coleridge walking there, talking and scribbling poetry). Both the land and the lake cradled in it are soft and dim with early-morning light (the 30 minute video was shot between 4:30 and 5:00 a.m.) The hills all around are dark and velvety, except for certain moments when the rising sun breaks through the clouds and briefly ignites the landscape.
But here's the hair-raising part: Drifting down through the brightening sky are what look like flaming nuggets of something or other - the "exiles" of the work's title. These flaming, torch-like bundles fall steadily into the scene - but not hectically, the way gravity would impel them to fall. Rather (and this makes the scene even creepier), they come settling softly to earth, splashing down into the lake, more visitation than threat.
Richardson says she harvested the flaming star-bits from a readily accessible supplier of video footage. She then animated and layered them onto her lake-scape, electronically randomizing their progress, and, in so doing, playing with factors such as speed, blur and saturation so that the almost graceful descent of these lyrical fireballs never looks mechanical.
It's a hypnotic work. Flaming star-bits falling to earth ought to look catastrophic, apocalyptic, in a sci-fi sort of way. But not Richardson's. Here, everything is silence (the sounds of birds is louder than the sound of the burning things) and softness. Are these star-exiles angels? Or some loosing of benediction upon the earth? Or is this the way the world ends? Not with a bang, but a whisper?