Richard Kerr (English)

Richard Kerr (born 1952, St Catherines Ontario) is a Canadian visual artist and filmmaker based in Montréal, where he teaches experimental film at Concordia University. Since the late 1970’s Kerr has produced an expansive body of work in analog film and digital video which have been screened at festivals, and collected by museums and galleries around the world.

Emerging as an important figure in the history of Canadian experimental cinema, Kerr has also maintained a dedicated teaching practice spanning over a period of 30 years. Within this period the nature and technological means of the moving image have profoundly changed while informing and expanding his relationship to his studio practice and pedagogical concerns. His work prompts a return to an experimental investigation of the image’s fundamental qualities, revealing film as material, chemical and translucent. Kerr’s work is both formal and tactile as he is concerned with the materiality of the image within an era of dematerialization that pushes the image towards a digital form, where images render themselves less visible yet ubiquitously opaque. In the late 1990’s he began making Motion Picture Weavings, a form he continues to explore in his studio as a direct response to the changing nature of filmmaking.