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Mary Reid Kelley (born 1979) is an American artist based in upstate New York.

Life

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Mary Reid Kelley was born in Greenville, SC in 1979.[1] Reid Kelley received her BFA from St. Olaf College in Minnesota and a MFA in painting from Yale University in 2009.[1] Reid Kelley's black and white videos fuse classical drama, modern literature and contemporary pop culture into observations on gender, class, and urban development. They satirize the promise of progress through dense layering of cultural references ranging from southern church socials and women's magazines to Borges and Baudelaire. Reid Kelley often works in collaboration with her partner, Patrick Kelley with whom she currently lives with in Saratoga Springs, New York.[2]

Mary Reid Kelley & Patrick Kelley at the Contemporary Dayton, Ohio, 2023

Reid Kelley is represented by the galleries Pilar Corrias in London, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects in Los Angeles, CA and Fredericks & Freiser in New York, NY.[1]

Work

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Reid Kelley is known for her short films, but often integrates her background of painting and drawing into her multimedia works.[3] For example, in her 2015 short film, The Thong of Dionysus, she integrates her drawing and painting skills in the set's background as seen by the harshly drawn and sharply outlined portraits behind the minotaur.[4] Reid Kelley's use of contrasting black and white further adds a cartoonish quality to her works, perpetuating the line between comedy and serious subject matter that Reid Kelley's works tend to play with.[2] Reid Kelley herself noted her ability to intertwine these multiple genres of art, writing,

I realized that I was desperate to enact the characters that were the forces behind my 2D work, and that in doing so, all my ‘non-art’ loves like literature and costume and wordplay could be rolled up into a time based work that functioned like a shout-y, rambunctious, emotionally incontinent painting.[4]

Writing in 2014, Daniel Belasco, Curator of Exhibitions and Programs at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at State University of New York at New Paltz, noted that Reid Kelley

works in the vanguard of a generation that blends the digital and the analog to discourse with the millennia. From 2008 to the present, her astonishing videos have fused live performance, animation, drawing, sculpture, and digital design. Her poignant characters—a nurse, a prostitute, a bohemian, the Minotaur—confront the limits of their historical 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, set in World War I, nineteenth-century Paris, and classical antiquity. Working with archival sources and a range of collaborators, especially Patrick Kelley, her husband and an accomplished artist, Reid Kelley invents a poetic mongrel media.[5]

While studying at Yale, Reid Kelley was able to benefit greatly from the archives of students who had left for World War One, realizing the importance of poetry for understanding both artistic and popular culture of the time.[3] In fact, her first four film projects focus on World War One: Camel Toe (2008), the Queen's English (2008), Sadie the Saddest Sadist (2009), and You Make Me Iliad (2010).[3] Additionally, in her research, Reid Kelley discovered that the female experience of these events was largely lost to the past, eclipsed by a profusion of poetry, literature and art produced by men. In an effort to pull women from the margins of historical records and textbooks, her work centers around female protagonists such as nurses, prostitutes, and factory workers.[3] Eleanor Heartney emphasized this point when she wrote,

The films they create riff on commedia dell’arte, German Expressionist movies, and newspaper comic strips, reimagining them in a format that resembles an animated drawing. They leap promiscuously through history and mythology, emphasizing moments when gender roles and social structures were in flux.[2]

The narrative short films of Mary Reid Kelley often take place during historical moments of social upheaval and war.[3] Also in these works, the themes of feminism and empowerment of women's voices remains fairly constant, but her style tends to vary depending on the subject matter of her projects.[6]

Interweaving historical and literary references, euphemisms, and clever puns within the parameters of rhyming verse,[7] her scripts are both humorous and complex. Her humorous lines are delivered with a deadpan quality, emphasizing the effectiveness of both her acting and writing styles.[6] The result is a delightful manipulation of language that satirizes established social structures while disrupting concepts of logic and reason with its nonsensical qualities.[8]

Reid Kelley has been the subject of many awards and honors throughout her career. She has been awarded the MacArthur Fellowship in 2016, the Baloise Art Prize in 2016, the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014,[9] and many more.[1]

Camel Toe (2008)

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Camel Toe is a film created by Reid Kelley in 2008. The piece is 1 min and 28 seconds long, and depicts Reid Kelley painted and dressed up as a British World War I aviator. The story begins with a British pilot reciting a poem about the love of his wife and a Sopwith Camel biplane. The pilot details how when he gifted his wife a vibrating toy plane she went into the bathroom and did not emerge, after which the he returned to plane's cockpit.[10] Reid Kelley was inspired by the War on Terror and the World War I memorials at Yale to begin a discourse surrounding war, gender roles, performance, and satire.[11]

The Queen's English (2008)

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The Queen's English is a film created by Reid Kelley in 2008, in which she utilizes stop motion and drawings to further the connections between word and image.[10] The piece is 4 minutes and 20 seconds long, and continues the dialogue surrounding World War I that Reid Kelley began in Camel Toe. The film begins with various objects, including noses, eyeballs, and hand, moving across a gray surface in a manner that aligns with the speech of Reid Kelley. The scene then changes to Reid Kelley as a World War I nurse within an army hospital tent reciting a poem describing her lost love and the suffering of soldiers who fell victim to the explosives of war.[10] Her animated use of limbs represents the physical destruction of war which is furthered by her poetry utilizing the language of loss to further comment on war, gender roles, hierarchies, word play, poetry, and the like.[10][11]

The Queen's English is further noteworthy as it is Reid Kelley's first time utilizing drawings as background. She employs two drawings framed within a one point perspective to detail the interior and exterior of a hospital tent, a drawing style she will later elaborate upon within future pieces such as You Make me Iliad or The Syphilis of Sisyphus.[12]

Sadie, the Saddest Sadist (2009)

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Sadie, the Saddest Sadist is a work created by Reid Kelley in 2008. The piece is 7 minutes and 23 seconds long, and is Reid Kelley's first time using props within her work. Within the films Reid Kelley plays both a factory worker and a sailor who engage in a sexual tryst that ends in betrayal and a STD.[10] Reid Kelley nods to George Herriman's Krazy Kat with her use of cartoonish depiction and caricatures, while utilizing stop motion to detail the scripts wordplay.[11]

You Make Me Iliad (2010)

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You Make Me Iliad is a work created by Reid Kelley in 2010.[13] The work is 14 minutes and 49 seconds long, and it is shot completely in black and white.[13] The story of the project follows two characters, a prostitute and a soldier, in German-occupied Belgium during the First World War; Reid Kelley portrays both characters.[13] In this work, Reid Kelley follows the theme of storytelling for women lost in history through witty lines and sharp humor contrasted against the background of sorrow and hardship.[14] Moreover, Reid Kelley was inspired to tell the story of her World War One heroine after discovering that most literature of the World War One era was written by men, leading to her heroine's story largely being narrated by the men in her life. This choice both reflects the problems of archival records that have largely been shaped by male voices and the irony of a woman's story being told by men who are largely ignorant to such experiences.[2]

The Syphilis of Sisyphus (2011)

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The Syphilis of Sisyphus is a work created by Reid Kelley in 2011.[15] The work is 11 minutes long and two seconds, and it is shot completely in black and white.[15] The story follows similar themes Reid Kelley's work has often subscribed to, following the story of a pregnant young woman, Sisyphus, who has contracted syphilis; Reid Kelley plays the role of Sisyphus.[16] Like her other works, Reid Kelley intertwines her poetic storytelling with humorous additions to bring light to the story of a forgotten and doomed woman in a highly romanticized time period: the French La Belle Époque.[16]

Priapus Agonistes (2013)

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Priapus Agonistes is a work created by Reid Kelley in 2013. The film is 15 minutes and 9 seconds long, and addresses the role of sports, beauty standards, and religion within American culture.[10] Reid Kelley acts as all of the characters within this piece in which Baptists and Presbyterians play a volleyball game that is announced by three beauty pageant contestants. The piece employs puns and satire to critique the pillars of misogyny, and the role of the beauty industry in perpetuating unrealistic beauty standards.[17]

Swinburne's Pasiphae (2014)

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Swinburne's Pasiphae is a work created by Reid Kelley in 2014. The film is 8 minutes and 59 seconds, and depicts Daedalus constructing a "carven beast," Pasiphae using pills and tabloids to quell her desire for the Minotaur, and the Minotaur longing for her mother.[10]

The Thong of Dionysus (2015)

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The Thong of Dionysus is a work created by Reid Kelley in 2015. The film is 9 minutes and 24 seconds, and depicts Dionysus partying and inviting Ariadne to Naxos while Priapus falls in love with the Minotaur.

This is Offal (2016)

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This is Offal is a work created by Reid Kelley in 2016. The film is 12 minutes and 51 seconds long, and depicts the argument between a woman's organs and her ghost after she committed suicide.[18] Reid Kelley drew inspiration from Thomas Hood's, The Bridge of Sighs, and addresses the complexity of human actions through the organs attempt to formulate a scientific explanation for such a tragic event.[18][10]

In the Body of The Sturgeon (2017)

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In the Body of the Sturgeon is a work created by Reid Kelley in 2017. The film is 12 minutes and 15 seconds long, and depicts the trials and tribulations of a World War II submarine crew.[18] Reid Kelley draws inspiration from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1855 poem, The Song of Hiawatha, and reimagines the history of settler colonialism and the politics of naval life.[19]

We Are Ghosts (2017)

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We Are Ghosts was featured at the Tate Liverpool and the Baltimore Museum of Art and was Reid Kelley's first museum solo project to be displayed in the UK. The work reimagines life on a U.S submarine, taking place at the end of World War Two.[20] The exhibition featured two of her classically black and white stylized short films: In the Body of the Sturgeon and This is Offal. The exhibition also displayed Reid Kelley's artistic strengths outside of film, showcasing her life-size light-box portraits of the characters shown in her films.[21] The work also follows the typical narration style used by Reid Kelley, blending poetry from historical sources to retell less glamorous and more realistic stories. Such accounts do not hedge around the misery and challenges faced by the characters, but they still maintain humorous and satirical themes.[20]

Rand/Goop (2019)

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Rand/Goop is a work created by Reid Kelley in 2019. The film is 13 minutes and 30 seconds long, in which it employs a 6-channel synchronized video with custom electronics.

The Rape of Europa (2021)

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I'm Jackson Pollock (2021)

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Blood Moon (2021)

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Blood Moon is a work created by Mary Reid Kelley and her partner Patrick Kelley in 2021, in which the two artists collaborated with the Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[22] This collaboration helped make the pumpkin heads, costumes, and kitchen props for Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley to utilize within their film, and was a new step in their art careers.[23] The film itself details a world in which Reid Kelley and Kelley explore what it means to be human, while drawing inspiration from John Steinbecks, Of Mice and Men.[23] The characters don pumpkin heads and navigate interpersonal relationships through a tragic, gruesome, yet comedic journey.[22]

Solo exhibitions

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References

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  1. ^ a b c d "Mary Reid Kelley | Biography". Pilar Corrias. Retrieved 2020-12-12.
  2. ^ a b c d Heartney, Eleanor (January 27, 2015). "Sex, Mayhem, and Ghosts of the Unconscious". ARTnews. Retrieved December 12, 2020.
  3. ^ a b c d e "No. 90: Mary Reid Kelley, Camille Utterback". The Modern Art Notes Podcast. 2014-11-02. Retrieved 2020-12-12.
  4. ^ a b "Mary Reid Kelley – 22 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy". www.artsy.net. Retrieved 2020-12-12.
  5. ^ Kelley, Mary Reid (2014). Mary Reid Kelley : Working objects and videos. New Paltz, New York: Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz and University Art Museum, State University of New York at Albany. p. 7. ISBN 978-0-615-70149-3. OCLC 871789322.
  6. ^ a b Cuir, Raphael (December 2014). "Mary Reid Kelley". Art-Press: 60–62. ISSN 0245-5676 – via Art Full Text.
  7. ^ "Transcript of 'The Syphilis of Sisyphyus'".
  8. ^ a b "Digital Collection | The Rose Art Museum | Brandeis University – Rosebud | Mary Reid Kelley". rosecollection.brandeis.edu. Retrieved 2020-12-12.
  9. ^ "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Mary Reid Kelley".
  10. ^ a b c d e f g h Porter, Janelle (2022). "What They Do or Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley, a Film-Biography" In Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley. Philadelphia, PA: The Fabric Workshop and Museum: Gregory R Miller & Co. pp. 13–44. ISBN 9781736014622.
  11. ^ a b c Madoff, Steven Henry (Nov 1, 2009). "Mary Reid Kelley". Artforum International. 48 (3): 207–209 – via ProQuest.
  12. ^ Belasco, Daniel (2014). "Unreality Effect: The Working Objects of Mary Red Kelley" In Mary Reid Kelley: Working Objects and Videos. New Paltz, New York: State University of New York. pp. 7–17. ISBN 0615701493.
  13. ^ a b c Robecchi, Michele (November 2010). "Mary Reid Kelley". Flash Art International: 102. ISSN 0394-1493 – via Art Full Text.
  14. ^ "Mary Reid Kelley: "You Make Me Iliad" (SHORT)". Art21. Retrieved 2020-12-12.
  15. ^ a b "THE SYPHILIS OF SISYPHUS (2011) – MARY REID KELLEY and PATRICK KELLEY". Retrieved 2020-12-12.
  16. ^ a b Sorkin, Jenni (2013). "Softer Atrocities: An Introduction to Mary Reid Kelley's The Syphilis of Sisyphus" (PDF). Gulf Coast Literary Journal: 94–96.
  17. ^ Murray, Jackie (2022). "The Poetotechnics and Metamorphoses of Mythifacture in Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley's Videos" In Mary Reid Kelley & Patrick Kelley. Philadelphia, PA.: Gregory R Miller & Co. pp. 63-78. ISBN 9781736014622.
  18. ^ a b c Reid Kelley, Mary (2017). Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley: We are Ghosts. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Tate Liverpool. ISBN 9781849765978.
  19. ^ Cambell, Andy (Feb 1, 2019). "Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley". ArtForum. 57 (6): 183-184. – via ProQuest.
  20. ^ a b c Tate. "Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley: We Are Ghosts – Exhibition at Tate Liverpool". Tate. Retrieved 2020-12-12.
  21. ^ a b "Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley". Baltimore Museum of Art. Retrieved 2020-12-12.
  22. ^ a b "Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley: Blood Moon". The Fabric Workshop and Museum. Retrieved 2023-12-19.
  23. ^ a b Vassallo, Christina (2022). "Foreword: Blood Moon Rises Over Two Years" In Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley. Philadelphia, PA: The Fabric Workshop and Museum: Gregory R Miller & Co. pp. 7–9. ISBN 9781736014622.
  24. ^ a b c d e f g Kelley, Mary Reid (2014). Mary Reid Kelley : Working objects and videos. New Paltz, New York: Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz & University Art Museum, University at Albany. p. 70. ISBN 978-0-615-70149-3. OCLC 871789322.
  25. ^ "The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art | SUNY New Paltz". www.newpaltz.edu. Retrieved 2020-12-12.
  26. ^ "Mary Reid Kelley: Working Objects and Videos | University at Albany". www.albany.edu. Retrieved 2020-12-12.
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