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Cindy Sherman by way of Virginia Woolf, Reid Kelley tells finely wrought narrative epics, rife with wordplay and art historical references.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 Teamed with her lexically complex scripts rife with historical references and wordplay, Reid Kelley’s works gesture to the instability of language and its role in history.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...
Nidhal Chamekh made the first drawings of the ongoing series Mémoire Promise in 2013...
Eileen Quinlan’s abstracted images, like Swipe , rely on the manipulation of photographic materials inside the studio itself, and reject the exterior world for complex interrogations of the medium....
They/Them by Juan Obando is a video essay and deepfake that uses Adobe Stock clips, maintaining their branded watermark, but animating the scenes underneath with a narrative of self-critical awareness...
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...
Tsumeb Fragments was produced for the exhibition at Kadist, “Comot Your Eyes Make I Borrow You Mine” in 2015...
6pm – Les Statues Meurent Aussi (1953) 7pm – It for Others (2013) The second in a monthly series of double features exploring the relationship between cinema and contemporary video and performance art, Kadist screens Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’ 1953 film, Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues Also Die) (1953) and Duncan Campbell’s Turner Prize -winning film It for Others (2013)...
Morvarid K — This too Shall Pass — Galerie Bigaignon — Exposition — Slash Paris Connexion Newsletter Twitter Facebook Morvarid K — This too Shall Pass — Galerie Bigaignon — Exposition — Slash Paris Français English Accueil Événements Artistes Lieux Magazine Vidéos Retour Morvarid K — This too Shall Pass Exposition Photographie Vue de l’exposition Morvarid K, This too Shall Pass, 2023 © D...
The graphite drawing 4 mourners on a mantel by Gala Porras-Kim is part of a larger installation and body of research, entitled An Index and Its Settings (Un Índice y Sus Entornos) , in which the artist reconsiders 235 ancient burial figures (from circa 200 BCE – 50 CE) from what is now Mexico’s Pacific coast that are part of the Proctor Stafford Collection held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)...
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...
Weekly Picks: Singapore (1 - 7 April 2019) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Weekly To Do April 1, 2019 SOTA Open House 2019, School of the Arts, 6 April, 9am – 4pm Unleash your child’s creative potential at SOTA Open House 2019 Want to learn more about the arts-enhanced education in SOTA? Join us on Apr 6, 2019 (Saturday), 9am to 4pm, at the SOTA Open House for tours of our vibrant campus, talks with teachers and students, and hands-on demonstrations...
Following Bruce Nauman’s seminal performance Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1967) – which sees the artist carefully trace a small delimited area of his studio exaggerating the movements of his hips as he places one foot in front of the other – Idir reproduces these performative gestures in Algiers, Algeria...
In a 2002 Pentagon press conference, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld addressed a question about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction with an unforgettable evasion: there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, the latter being the most precarious...