Mixed media

Interim, Kelly’s second large-scale installation, which includes Part I: Corpus, Part II: Pecunia, Part III: Historia, and Part IV: Potestas, explores themes concerned with the construction of feminine subjectivity. In Corpus, the artist’s first person narratives explore fantasies of aging, filtered through discourses of fashion, medicine and fiction. Each group of six panels is named after one of the five passionate attitudes that psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot attributed to hysterical women in the late-nineteenth century. Extase, Menacé, Supplication, Érotisme and Appel are each represented by an item of clothing folded or tied three different ways, one to accompany each narrative. The shadows cast by the photo laminates underscore the artist’s avoidance of figurative representation, and strategic use of the indexical sign. Pecunia evokes the problematic relation to money, while Potestas exposes the subtle encoding of power in everyday life, and Historia reflects on women’s time.

Source: “Interim,” Mary Kelly, http://www.marykellyartist.com/interim.html. Accessed October 9, 2013.

Mary Kelly is known for her project-based work, addressing questions of sexuality, identity and historical memory in the form of large-scale narrative installations. She studied painting in Florence, Italy, in the sixties, and then taught art in Beirut, Lebanon during a time of intense cultural activity known as the “golden age.” In London, England she began her long-term critique of conceptualism, informed by the feminist theory of the early womenʼs movement in which she was actively involved throughout the 1970s.

In 1989 she joined the faculty of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. During the nineties, she focused on the issue of war: first, spectacle, in Gloria Patri, 1992, using components of polished aluminum, then trauma, in Mea Culpa, 1999, developing the ephemeral medium of compressed lint to form text in intaglio. This process culminated in a continuous, linear relief of more than 200 feet, The Balland of Kastriot Rexhepi, 2001.

More recently, she has turned to the theme of collective memory. For Circa 1968, first shown in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, she transcribed an emblematic image of Paris on the eve of the general strike, into lint and projected light noise, and in Love Songs, 2005-07, she collaborated with younger women on the restaging of protest photographs from her archive. Since 1996, Kelly has been Professor Art and Critical Theory Art in the School of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles where she has established an Interdisciplinary Studio area for graduate students engaged in site-specific, collective and project-based practices.

Source: “Artist Biography,” Mary Kelly, http://www.marykellyartist.com/biography.html. Accessed October 9, 2013.