April 06, 2012 — June 24, 2012
Mary Reid Kelley: Performing Histories
Employing formative animation techniques, artist Mary Reid Kelley creates haunting videos that revisit the physical and psychological impact of early-twentieth-century times of war on civilians and non-civilians. Entrenched in scripts of euphemisms, clichés, riddles, and puns, her characters (often performed by the artist herself) embody men and women working as sailors, soldiers, nurses, prostitutes, and factory laborers in Europe. Influenced by German Expressionism, she paints herself with line and shadow to blend into the illusionistic space of constructed sets and props. Her poetic performances blur fact and fiction, ultimately destabilizing reality and the possibility of meaning.
Mary Reid Kelley: Performing Histories presents four of the artist’s latest videos. In The Queen’s English (2008), a nurse narrates the death of a soldier as visual forms, symbolic of the fragmentation of the body and of meaning in language, parade across the screen. Reid Kelley’s Sadie, The Saddest Sadist (2009) and You Make Me Iliad (2010) continue the artist’s investigation of women’s role in times of conflict. In these videos, rhyming couplets bite with an expansive range of visual and literary references, while startling juxtapositions of live-action performance combine with stop-motion animation. Her latest video, The Syphilis of Sisyphus (2011), is set in mid-nineteenth-century Paris where the heroine (a young, pregnant bohemian) expounds on beauty, artifice, and denigrating the natural world.
Born in Greenville, South Carolina, Mary Reid Kelley received her MFA in painting from Yale University and has participated in exhibitions at SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico, Susanne Vielmetter Projects, Los Angeles, and Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, New York, among others. The making of The Syphilis of Sisyphus is featured in the current season of the award-winning PBS series ART21.
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Salina Art Center programs, exhibitions and films are presented in part by Salina Art Center donors; the Horizons Grants Program of Salina Arts & Humanities, City of Salina; and by the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency which believes that a great nation deserves great art.