Christopher Richmond
works exhibitions news about
Double Fantasy
March 5 - April 23, 2016
Opening Reception: March 5, 6 - 9pm
press release
Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to announce Double Fantasy, the first major solo exhibition in the United States of works by Los Angeles-based artist Christopher Richmond. Double Fantasy features two new ambitious 16mm film and video works by the artist, and marks the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Baffling and beautiful, Christopher Richmond makes films, videos, and photographs that challenge traditional story-telling conventions. Fixed meaning is subsumed in an animating tide of sound and light. By disrupting chronology, plot, and standard character development, Richmond invites the viewer to actively participate in the creation of meaning—to abandon the role of passive onlooker and become an active collaborator. Thematically, Richmond’s work explores the human condition, and his unconventional approach to narrative affords a range of alternate impressions.
In Panthalassa (2015), an eccentric cast sailing across an endless ocean at night hosts a series of otherworldly monologues where dream and reality become confused and creation myths collide with dialogue from sitcom television. Marooned for some unexplained reason on a boat in an uncertain time and in an ocean where the sun never seems to rise, it is not this state of limbo itself that threatens; rather, it is some unknown and irresistible force that lurks just beyond. In this fifty-minute, two-channel film scored by the Los Angeles band Xina Xurner and artist Elisa Harkins, the characters show a surprising capacity and predilection for irrational thinking.
In Rendezvous (2016), an asteroid sails closer and closer to earth, a stranger sits alone in a room, and aliens playfully wander in your backyard in a potent and playful commentary on extra-terrestrials, love, and the great unknown. Amidst this disorienting swirl and the interplay of image and sound, gesture and rhythm, and impassivity and emotion, a breakdown occurs and the everyday is made strange.
Christopher Richmond (b. 1986 Solana Beach, CA) earned his MFA from the Roski School of Fine Arts at USC in 2014 and his BFA from Lawrence and Kristina Dodge College of Film and Media Arts at Chapman University in 2009. He received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist grant in 2014. He lives and works in Los Angeles.