DAILY SERVING » Mary Reid Kelley

Odd Jobs: Mary Reid Kelley

Calder Yates — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 08:00:48 +0000

Odd Jobs is a column exploring artists’ varied and untraditional career arcs. For this installment I spoke with Mary Reid Kelley, whose videos explore the condition of women throughout history by reassessing canonical literary and historical narratives. Reid Kelley writes the scripts, designs the sets, props, and costumes, and performs the leading roles. She and her partner, Patrick Kelley, produce all of the videos. Her videos and installations have been screened, exhibited, and performed at numerous national and international venues, including the Hammer Museum, the Tate Modern, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. She is a senior critic at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design and a critic in painting at the Yale University School of Art.

Mary Reid Kelley. Priapus Agonistes, 2013 (still); HD video with sound; 15:09. Courtesy of the Artist and Susanne Vielmetter Projects.

Calder Yates: You were born in Greenville, South Carolina, and then went to St. Olaf College. What did you do after graduating?

Mary Reid Kelley: I was always a food-service person. After college I worked at a coffee shop in town. Eventually I got a regular waitressing job at a restaurant, which really worked well for me. I was able to work twenty or twenty-five hours a week, make enough to live on, and spend a lot of time in my studio.

CY: Is that what you did up until you went to Yale?

MRK: Yup, that’s what I did. And the restaurant—it was kind of a wine bar—I did a little bit of management. I think you can really learn a lot about people. If you have a job where you’re not miserable and you’re not getting stepped on and abused, which you’re vulnerable to as a low-wage worker in a lot of service industries, I think there’s a lot of opportunities for observation and benign spying.

CY: After Yale, what did you end up doing?

MRK: Well, my partner was teaching full time at a small college in Maryland while I was in New Haven. We made this decision to live apart entirely for financial reasons. It was hard for both of us. I think we would have done better if we both had been in New Haven and just trusted that Pat would find something. When I left Yale, Pat switched jobs and taught at Skidmore.

I got lucky right out of school and started showing with a gallery [Fredericks & Freiser] in New York. I started making a little money with them, but it wasn’t enough to live on if I did not have a partner who was employed full time. Eventually, Pat quit his job. It took us about three years to begin making enough money from the video work so that Pat could collaborate with me full time, which allowed the work to be more complicated. Ever since then we’ve been self-employed.

Mary Reid Kelley. Sisyphus as Bride, 2013; collage, watercolor, charcoal, and acrylic on paper; 31.5 x 18 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Susanne Vielmetter Projects.

CY: It’s pretty amazing that the two of you met and have this creative partnership together.

MRK: It’s definitely very fruitful. But just because you’re collaborating and you’re committed, it doesn’t mean the relationship is conflict-free. There are always some serious, creative, organizational, or division-of-labor problems to solve. And we have to solve them together.

We’ve gone back and forth with who’s the breadwinner and at what time. We’ve kind of just supported each other. When I went to school, I really wasn’t making any money. Pat was making the money. Now we consider what we make to be equally both of ours. And I realized what an enormous benefit it was for me, not just in terms of financial stability but also emotional stability.

I think if you, as an artist, have any source of help, whether it’s a family member who wants to give you a hand, or if you have a good romantic partnership that can get you through all the unpredictability of being an artist, you should just take it.

CY: I remember reading this New York Times article about Sheryl Sandberg’s husband. Not that Sheryl Sandberg is any kind of a model for intersectional feminist success or achievement, but her husband, and how he functioned in the relationship, definitely seemed like a model for, I don’t know…a feminist husband?

MRK: She often mentions that a good romantic partner can bring stability and confidence to you professionally. And I think that type of giving credit is important.

It is the case that Pat and I work full-time together. The process always begins with my research and writing, but I’ve been sharing more and letting him into the process earlier, which changes the authorial dynamics. But the way that things have evolved, I am more or less the public face of the work. However, if anyone knows very much about the work, if anyone goes beneath the surface of the work, Pat is there and the work is attributed to us both.

Because we both acknowledge that the backbone of the work is the writing and the script, which is entirely my task, then we’re willing to live with this kind of situation…of unequal acknowledgment for the work that we do. Sometimes this is hard for both of us. But it’s something that we both have to live with.

Mary Reid Kelley. This Is Offal, 2016 (still); HD video with sound; 12:51. Courtesy of the Artist and Susanne Vielmetter Projects.

CY: When an artist has a separate job or income away from their art practice, sometimes they’re shy about acknowledging it. What do you attribute that to?

MRK: I think that when people say, “Yeah I’m 28, I’m a waitress and I have a college degree,” which is the position that I was in before I went back to school, it’s your pride. You don’t always know how to prove that you’ve achieved a measure of success, unless it comes with market success or gallery representation or being included in those high-status shows or whatever.

Also it’s completely a result of people largely accepting whatever value the market confers upon their work. There are some artists who do really, really well on the market, but their names don’t come up when you talk to other artists. There are other artists who are incredibly important and vital and who have a very small market footprint. And then there are artists who are kind of in the middle.

There isn’t any simple or single path that you can walk down and, at the end of it, you’ll be an artist. You just kind of have to grope along blindly. People are so demanding that you cough up the information on what you’re about, and you may not be able to give that when you’re a young artist, or even later on in your career.

I just want to tell you that this [column] is exactly the kind of thing I would love to have read when I was twenty and it was beginning to occur to me that I wanted to be an artist but I didn’t know at all how you did that.

Hammer Projects: Mary Reid Kelley at Hammer Museum

Bean Gilsdorf — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 07:00:57 +0000

Now on view at Hammer Museum, Mary Reid Kelley’s videos are a collision of drawing, performance, and wordplay that clatter against Greek mythology to produce a visually spare, lexically rich cycle. Working with videographer Patrick Kelley, the artist has produced three black-and-white videos that follow the story of the half-woman, half-bull Minotaur, her lust-crazed mother Pasiphae, and her helpless sister Ariadne through boldly drawn landscapes. A complex weave of alienation and irreverence burlesques the original stories to create a spectacle that is equal parts tragedy and farce.

Mary Reid Kelley with Patrick Kelley. Priapus Agonistes, 2013 (video still); single-channel HD video, black and white, sound; 15:09. Courtesy of the Artists; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, New York; and Pilar Corrias, London.

The ancient tales are spiked with contemporary elements, and crisis is contrasted with absurd humor. The first video, Priapus Agonistes (2013), sets the drama in a small-town gymnasium, where the outcome of a volleyball game will determine the next sacrifice to the Minotaur. The cocksure Priapus (“the one-eyed Prince of Athens”) swaggers onto the court and wins handily, but as he mocks Ariadne and Pasiphae, the camera pans down to the labyrinth underneath, where the Minotaur paces—hunting not for victims, but for a bathroom. With her hands pressed to her crotch, she trots along the gray cinderblock corridors covered in graffiti left by her victims. “I hate Crete!” reads one missive; another foreshadows her fate: “Murderer! Your end is near, bitch.”

A flashback scene explains the prehistory of the Minotaur. Queen Pasiphae sunbathes with Venus, who has the face of a bulldog. After trading jealous barbs replete with innuendo and double entendres, Venus zaps Pasiphae with a curse that makes her mad with lust for a bull. She taunts her rival, “Well, your china shop will take new dynamics / When I put a bull in your ceramics. / We have our beef! And I am vowed, / Proud Pasiphae, to make you cowed.” Pasiphae struts and preens, Venus throws shade, and the act could have been subtitled The Real Housewives of Crete.

Mary Reid Kelley with Patrick Kelley. Swinburne’s Pasiphae, 2014 (video still); HD video, black and white, sound; 8:58. Courtesy of the Artists; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, New York; and Pilar Corrias, London.

Swinburne’s Pasiphae (2014) takes its dialogue from 18th-century English writer Algernon Charles Swinburne. Although the piece is as linguistically dense, it is not flippant and acts as a foil to the sassy banter of the other plays. Pasiphae approaches craftsman Daedalus to build her a cow-shaped decoy so she can crawl inside and mate with a bull. Daedalus doesn’t question her desire; he measures, saws, and hammers away happily, fully invested in the industry of creation, while Pasiphae tries to cool her heat with prescription drugs and lowbrow magazines. The video takes on a somber tone at the end, with a voiceover intoning, “…and all day / Thy tempest-shaken spirit shakes thee through / And thy spent body sickens with thy soul” as the scene shifts to the estranged Minotaur lying on the floor of the desolate labyrinth, her torso heaving with sobs.

Mary Reid Kelley with Patrick Kelley. The Thong of Dionysus, 2015 (video still); HD video, black and white, sound; 9:27. Courtesy of the Artists; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, New York; and Pilar Corrias, London.

The final and most lively act, The Thong of Dionysus (2015), begins with a drunk Dionysus—looking a lot like Weird Al Yankovic—lolling on a chaise lounge, with the maenads chorusing behind him. He narrates his own grape-laden manifesto of debauchery before turning to the matter of Ariadne’s plight: She mourns her own abandonment by her libidinous mother and the death of her sister as the sea rises all around her. A confused Priapus wanders in the maze before finally happening onto the Minotaur, who is already dead from loneliness. Here, Dionysus’s caustic monologue tugs the narrative thread running between the eccentric elements of the entire cycle, pulling the contemporary back to Greek philosophy:

In a Labyrinth, everyone thinks they’re a prince,
In control of a string which will bring them back home,
Oh, I’ve written a Thesis on Theseus syndrome.

You start by believing your brain’s little voices,
I’m in charge of my life! I’m the sum of my choices!
Spend all of your time like a mime in a box,
acting smart in a carton, showing off in your coffin!

You hate fate so can’t ask it, is this room my casket?
Do I defy gods, or am I their mascot,
their doll to inflate, their plotline to weave,
a bauble abandoned, a plaything deceived.

In the end, Priapus falls in love with the dead Minotaur and lies down beside her to die. Meanwhile, Ariadne comes to Dionysus’s den and tries to kill herself. The maenads convince her that she needs “a raisin to live.” They dance all night in a permanent state of “Disco Tent.”

Reid Kelley’s other works based in Greek myth, such as The Syphilis of Sisyphus (2011) and You Make Me Iliad (2010), also use sharply designed sets and clever wordplay to great effect; and the works on view at Hammer are clearly a richer measure of what came before. They are mesmerizing, but their delight is tinged with melancholy; for underneath the barbed repartee, the characters are wretched creatures bound to continue along paths that lead to their undoing. The strength of Reid Kelley’s work is in her inventiveness, reinvigorating ancient tales with contemporary perspectives. If these works seem atemporal, it’s only because lust, pride, poor choices, loneliness, and discontent are timeless.

Mary Reid Kelley is on view at Hammer Museum through September 27, 2015.