Richard Kerr (artist)

Richard Kerr (born 3 February 1952) is a Canadian filmmaker, visual artist and professor. Since the late 1970s, Kerr developed his practice across diverse media including analog film and digital video. Kerr is a faculty member at Concordia University in Montreal, where he teaches experimental filmmaking.

Kerr left high school without graduating to pursue a career as a professional hockey player. Eventually, he discovered photography which led him to study filmmaking.[1] Kerr's early films were associated with the "Escarpment School," a group of avant-garde filmmakers that began at Sheridan College in Ontario in the late 1970s. Others in the School included Philip Hoffman, Steve Sanguedolce, Gary Popovich, Carl Brown and Louise Lebeau.[2]

In the late 1980s Kerr made various trips to the American Southwest to shoot black and white film in the desert and in Los Angeles, material that later would lead to two of his most important films Last Days of Contrition (1988), and Cruel Rhythm (1991).[3]

In the mid-1990s, Kerr's practice began including installation. He was interested in exploring the materiality of film. He started working with digital video "sketching" and "motion picture weaving." His weaving involves gathering old Hollywood feature films, trailers and filmstrips of his own outtakes. The material is often chemically altered through studio processes before being woven and sealed between layers of glass that is then mounted in custom fluorescent back-lit light boxes. Kerr's motion picture weavings deal with formal concerns of material and composition through creating visual abstractions of the original cinematic representations.[4]