Kelley’s 2015 portrait of the poet Charles Baudelaire is one of a series of poets, rappers, and other thinkers who have influenced the artist’s ideas about beauty, creativity, and expression. As a challenging artist who marches to her own drum, Mary Reid Kelley is in the vanguard of a generation that blends the digital and the analog to dialogue with history. From 2009 to the present, she has made videos that fuse live performance, animation, drawing, sculpture, and digital design. Her characters—a nurse, a prostitute, a bohemian, Ariadne, and the Minotaur—confront the limits of their situations in droll verse. Blending Homer and Cindy Sherman by way of Virginia Woolf, Reid Kelley tells finely wrought narrative epics, rife with wordplay and art historical references. She situates her work in World War I, nineteenth-century Paris, or classical antiquity. Working with archival sources and a range of collaborators, often Patrick Kelley, her husband and an accomplished artist, Reid Kelley invents a poetic hybrid of mediums. By creating or manipulating different aspects of language, performance, and mise-en-scène, she rethinks the potential of the inauthentic to heighten our awareness of the real.
Drawing from literature, plays, and historical events, Mary Reid Kelley makes rambunctious videos that explore the condition of women throughout history. They sardonically critique the view that recent social progress has resolved the unequal standing of women in society. Her work often involves intensive research and critical re-assessments of archetypal historical narratives—scholarship delivered as highly structured poetic verse, which serves as dialogue filled with contemporary cultural references. Her characters leap promiscuously through history and mythology, emphasizing moments of flux in gender roles and social structures. Working with videographer Patrick Kelley, Reid Kelley’s characters are usually all performed by her, disguised in elaborate costuming and makeup. They traverse animated and live-action landscapes created from the artist’s drawings and paintings. Initially trained as a painter, Reid Kelley’s stylized black-and-white visuals recall the crude aesthetics of early animation and the lo-tech look of amateur film. Teamed with her lexically complex scripts rife with historical references and wordplay, Reid Kelley’s works gesture to the instability of language and its role in history.
ArtsEquator's Top 10 Picks at the Performing Arts Meeting 2019 | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles José Maceda, Cassettes 100, 1971, Photo by Nathaniel Gutierrez, Courtesy of UP Center for Ethnomusicology and Ringo Bunoan January 10, 2019 Established in 1995, the Tokyo Performing Arts Market (TPAM) was created to be a platform to network Japanese artists with producers and funders...
Lara uses things readily at hand to create objects and situations that interrogate the processes of art and the spectrum of roles that art and artists play in society...
Mullican’s Stick Figure Drawings depict characters reduced to their most basic graphic representation...
Tsumeb Fragments was produced for the exhibition at Kadist, “Comot Your Eyes Make I Borrow You Mine” in 2015...
Untitled (Perfect Lovers + 1) by Cerith Wyn Evans takes as its starting point Felix Gonzales-Torres’s seminal work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) , in which two clocks were synchronized and left to run without interference, the implication being that one would stop before the other...
The Art of Fashion and Legacy: Carla Sozzani and Byronesque’s Unique Collaboration – A Shaded View on Fashion https://byronesque.com/fondazione_sozzani/ Dear Shaded Viewers, In a remarkable intersection of art and fashion, Carla Sozzani, the revered figure in the world of fashion, has embarked on a unique collaboration with Byronesque...
50 Years Ago, Barbara Nessim Broke Illustration’s Glass Ceiling Skip to content Barbara Nessim, “A Maze From Above” (1970), pen and ink and watercolor on paper, 14 x 10 1/4 inches (all images courtesy Derek Eller Gallery unless noted otherwise) Artist, illustrator, and designer Barbara Nessim is one of very few women who found full-time work in the American editorial and commercial arts sphere during the 1960s...
Press Release: Art21 to Release New Film: “Hannah Levy’s Adaptive Structures” | Art21 Our Series Art in the Twenty-First Century Extended Play New York Close Up Artist to Artist William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible Specials Art21.live An always-on video channel featuring programming hand selected by Art21 Playlists Curated by Art21 staff, with guest contributions from artists, educators, and more Art21 Library Explore over 700 videos from Art21's television and digital series Latest Video 15:03 Add to watchlist Politics of Listening Lawrence Abu Hamdan Extended Play February 7, 2024 Search Searching Art21… Welcome to your watchlist Look for the plus icon next to videos throughout the site to add them here...
Morvarid K — This too Shall Pass — Bigaignon Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris Login Newsletter Twitter Facebook Morvarid K — This too Shall Pass — Bigaignon Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris English Français Home Events Artists Venues Magazine Videos Back Morvarid K — This too Shall Pass Exhibition Photography Vue de l’exposition Morvarid K, This too Shall Pass, 2023 © D...