Charles Baudelaire
2015 - Photography (Photography)
Mary Reid Kelley
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Cindy Sherman by way of Virginia Woolf, Reid Kelley tells finely wrought narrative epics, rife with wordplay and art historical references.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 Teamed with her lexically complex scripts rife with historical references and wordplay, Reid Kelley’s works gesture to the instability of language and its role in history.
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