Mary Reid Kelley (born 1979) is an American artist based in upstate New York.
Life
Mary Reid Kelley was born in Greenville, SC in 1979. Reid Kelley received her BFA from St. Olaf College in Minnesota and a MFA in painting from Yale University in 2009. 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.
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.
Work
Reid Kelley is known for her short films, but often integrates her background of painting and drawing into her multimedia works. 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. 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. 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. 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.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. 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). 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. 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.The narrative short films of Mary Reid Kelley often take place during historical moments of social upheaval and war. 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.
Interweaving historical and literary references, euphemisms, and clever puns within the parameters of rhyming verse, 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. The result is a delightful manipulation of language that satirizes established social structures while disrupting concepts of logic and reason with its nonsensical qualities.