Richard Kerr: Field Trips

Canadian artist-filmmaker Richard Kerr was raised in a north-south family near the American border. From a young age he was preoccupied with the vision of empire reflected in American mass culture and sport. As he matured as a filmmaker, Kerr began to turn his attention increasingly to America as a subject, undertaking road trips through the American southwest, studying the spirit of a landscape made for cinema.

The first of these films, The Last Days of Contrition (1988) peers at post-apocalyptic tableaux manifesting along the roadside, scenes from a decaying American dream in the waning days of the Cold War. Kerr followed this with Cruel Rhythm (1991), a compendium of southwest tourism bursting with combustible undercurrents. After two decades, Kerr returned to the theme of American desolation with Field Trip (2021). Made from crumpled photographs taken on earlier trips, Field Trip is an exercise where subject and form are joined in an embattled abstraction, flags and signs of restlessness bleeding through the arcs and ridges of Kerr's violent abstraction.