Mary Reid Kelley combines painting, performance, and her distinctive wordplay-rich poetry in polemical, graphically stylized videos made in collaboration with her partner, Patrick Kelley. Their videos explore history, language, and literature from a feminist perspective and are often uproariously hilarious. The carefully crafted scripts use humor to reimagine or poke fun at historical narratives. In addition to writing the texts that drive the videos, Reid Kelley performs all the speaking characters herself, disguised by elaborate costuming and makeup. Shot in stark, metallic black and white, both Kelleys draw us into an absurd realm decked out in dramatic black-and-white paintwork. Figures totter and gesticulate like marionettes, endowed with Ping-Pong balls for eyes and bearing black contour lines across their bodies.
The video trilogy—Priapus Agonistes (2013), Swinburne’s Pasiphae (2014), and The Thong of Dionysus (2015)—is a key example of their work. The trilogy explores the story of the Minotaur, the half man (though in this case half woman), half bull mythological character of ancient Greece. Reframing this well-known myth through a feminist lens amplifying the themes of female desire and masculine prowess, they use slapstick and multidimensional wordplay to create a frenetic, high-octane re-telling. The Minotaur Trilogy follows a long line of artists who have focused on the beast, such as Pablo Picasso and the Surrealists. In addition to the videos, the Kelleys also make sculpture and installations from the film props and sets, as well as drawings, paintings, and life-size, highly detailed lightbox photographs of the characters from the films.
Mary Reid Kelley was born in 1979 and lives and works in Los Angeles. Mary Reid Kelley graduated with an MFA from Yale in 2009. She has received numerous awards for her work including a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship; a Guggenheim Fellowship, Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award, and an AICA Award in Best Time-Based Format (performance, video film, sound) for Mary Reid Kelley: Working Objects and Videos, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, NY, Curated by Daniel Belasco, among many others.
Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Collection, The Goetz Collection in Munich, Germany, and the UBS Art Collection in New York, NY, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA.
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- 2001
Selected Solo and Two Person Exhibitions
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Selected Group Exhibitions
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Bibliography
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Awards, Grants and Fellowships
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Teaching Experience
Public Collections