KELLY RICHARDSON Birch Libralato (129 Tecumseth, 416-365-3003) to June 8.
In her large-scale composite digital works and videos, Richardson painstakingly blends and animates elements from other images into a believable, immersive whole.
These fantastic yet strangely credible visual worlds seem to mimic the inevitable blending of digital simulacra into our daily lived experience.
Orion Tide is a melancholy scene of exodus in which 10 rocket ships appear to be departing from the surface of a desolate future Earth. Here’s how Richardson describes her process:
“Orion Tide was created with a combination of a real landscape from West Texas, a digitally constructed star-filled sky and computer-generated rocket trails.
“After significant research and development, in order to produce believable effects in both print and video, I took two different approaches. I used one to produce a suitable level of detail in the smoke for the C-prints and employed another, in an alternate software program, to create realistic movement in the video.
“The process took approximately a year, including several months of render time.”