Christopher Richmond. Moiré.

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The skeletal plot of a video, for instance, becomes the subject of the artist’s meticulous drawing titled Outline I. That work then forms the nucleus of another drawing charting the project’s progress, Outline II, which features a rolled-up tube of greenscreen paper in its lower right corner. Furnishing the wooded backdrop in Apollo, the greenscreen is interrupted, and ultimately unconvincing, as it’s captured mid-trick. The artist’s studio mate’s fern appears to the humanoid bat’s left, and again in the monumentally scaled drawing Outline III, along with a tray of crystals hot glued to LED lights, a hanging cotton space suit, and a conspicuous pair of Rainbow sandals. 

A moiré effect–a type of interference pattern–occurs when two similar patterns, like lines, grids, or dot arrays, overlap. The result, rhythmic striations, overload eyes as well as camera sensors: the consequence of an outmatched camera attempting to capture fine detail. Richmond’s practice, here, boasts a similar profile. Attempts to fully parse a universe, or neatly partition it, prove futile, as the artist remains committed to an ongoing critique of narrative structure itself. 

His photographs Black Hole II and Self-Portrait as a Black Hole, for example, cast the studio–and the self–as demarcations of time and space, sites where the supposedly infinite is temporarily reined in. But in Still Life with Ladi, that same space, cluttered with ephemera, props, and miscellanea, feels relatably terrestrial. That work’s varied lines, wispy, heavy, raspy, and craggy, occasionally jostle one another, vying for primacy on the picture’s vibrational surface.  

Richmond’s particular flavor of moiré results from his gleeful, almost dutiful, inclusiveness when approaching the canon of his practice. A chance object that makes its way into the studio might hang around a while, becoming a bit player in future works alongside more deliberately conceived and executed objects and characters. As artworks re-enter the fray alongside shelved ideas and retired set pieces, their meanings change and renew. Richmond’s latest works are pervasively honest, cutting through refracted storylines and cross-media cameos, toward confessional transparency. 

His first exhibition of large-scale photographs and drawings unaccompanied by a video piece, Richmond takes full advantage of the static picture plane, inviting extended looking and providing opportunities for the viewer to pull at the assorted threads that define this world. With thought processes, roundabouts, and loose ends serving as material, Richmond invites us ever deeper into this realm, at-once intensely personal and dizzyingly vast.