In the video The Syphilis of Sisyphus (2011), Reid Kelley transported her heroine to the French demimonde. The film centers on a pregnant Parisian prostitute who exemplifies Baudelaire’s paean to the superiority of cosmetic over natural beauty. With sets that shift between Sisyphus’s boudoir and the streets of Paris, the work is an antic romp through Revolutionary and post Revolutionary France, with brief vignettes involving everyone from Diderot, Marie Antoinette, and Marat to Robespierre, Napoleon, and Haussmann. In a commentary on the fate of overly aggressive women, it ends with our rebellious heroine carted off to Charcot’s sanatorium.
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 Teamed with her lexically complex scripts rife with historical references and wordplay, Reid Kelley’s works gesture to the instability of language and its role in history.
The theme of the end of the world, of the last man on earth, recurs in our literary and cinematographic culture and in our imaginary: “we had this dream before, the dream that we’re alone.” In The Secret Life of Things , the narrator presents himself as an enthusiast and expert on films announcing the end of the world and those staging someone waking up to discover that they are the only survivor on earth...
The video 9000 PIECES by Euan Macdonald was filmed at a musical instrument factory in Shanghai where 90 percent of the pianos that they manufacture are exported around the world, and only 10 percent are “finished” and can be labeled “Made in the US (or) Europe.” The video captures an intricate network of mechanisms as they interact with each other, their rhythmic movements resulting in an intense choreography and a cacophony of metallic sounds dramatized by Macdonald’s editing...
McCarthy’s Mother Pig performance at Shushi Gallery in 1983 was the first time he used a set, a practice which came to characterize his later works...
Blindseye Arranger (Max) (2013) features a greyscale arrangement of rudimentary shapes layered atop one another like a dense cluster of wood block prints, the juxtaposition of sharp lines and acute angles creating an abstracted field of rectangular and triangulated forms composed as if in a cubist landscape...
Priapus Agonistes by Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley is the first work in The Minotaur Trilogy (2013-2015), a trio of videos that reimagine the Greek myth of the Minotaur...
This photograph of Martin Creed himself was used as the invitation card for a fundraising auction of works on paper at Christie’s South Kensington in support of Camden Arts Centre’s first year in a refurbished building in 2005...
Commissioned for the 2012 Whitney Biennial, Hearsay of the Soul (2012) is Werner Herzog’s ode to the landscape paintings of the 17th-century Dutch artist Hercules Segers...
Future of Hope - Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation About Us Mission & Vision The Collection Partners Contact Us Projects & Programming Majhi International Art Residency Elephant in the room Bhumi Future of Hope No Place Like Home News Press releases & News Interviews Features Search Search About Us Mission & Vision The Collection Partners Contact Us Projects & Programming Majhi International Art Residency Elephant in the room Bhumi Future of Hope No Place Like Home News Press releases & News Interviews Features About Us Mission & Vision The Collection Partners Contact Us Projects & Programming Majhi International Art Residency Elephant in the room Bhumi Future of Hope No Place Like Home News Press releases & News Interviews Features Search Future of Hope আশা ! 9 Invited Artists & Their Works Creative Transmission During Pandemic History and Present Pandora, in Greek mythology, the first woman...
Priapus Agonistes by Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley is the first work in The Minotaur Trilogy (2013-2015), a trio of videos that reimagine the Greek myth of the Minotaur...
Situated in German-occupied Belgium at the end of World War I, Y ou Make Me Iliad by Mary Reid Kelley focuses on the story of two...
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...
In the Soldier’s Head evokes the traumas of war through the prism of the hallucinations of a soldier...
In 1995, the personal and professional archives of the Mexican architect Luis Barragán were acquired (including the rights to the name and the work of the architect) by the Swiss furniture enterprise Vitra...
Unhealed by Tenzing Rigdol is a photograph of the artist’s back tattooed with a map of Tibet with the dates of important political events...