Mary Reid Kelley & Patrick Kelley
Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to announce the gallery premiere of Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley’s films Rand/Goop and The Rape of Europa and accompanying large-scale paintings on paper. For their fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, Mary and Pat further their investigation into the utility of linguistic and aesthetic parody through a prism of historical events and contemporary popular culture.
Rand/Goop, originally commissioned by Studio Voltaire in London, has been realized in a new sculptural six-channel video installation of floating heads affixed to the wall in individual boxes. All performed by Mary, the women of the film espouse four-line centos which splice together evangelist scholars’ analysis of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism with headlines from articles on Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop lifestyle empire. On a 13:30 minute loop, the women’s determined musings at first seem to be coherent, searing, insightful quips. More time with their words reveal both sense and nonsense in their linguistic construction: “Choosing the serum that works / Only on faith / Is known as the Middle Ages / Of self-improvement;” “I had a baby months ago and I still feel / Unexpected post-Kantian affinities / With the pelvic floor / Of economic success.” Sometimes the chorus of voices swell as multiple characters speak at once in emphasis. As powerful white women who are both maligned and revered, and whose cultural output is profoundly influential and often silly, Rand and Paltrow are engaged here through the intellectual practice of parody. In Rand/Goop, language is an endlessly malleable referent that mirrors and mocks our inherited philosophies of the self.
The Rape of Europa, commissioned by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in response to Titian’s painting of the same mythology, represents the most heightened technological involvement of Mary and Pat’s practice thus far. With a digital set animated to match a motion-tracked handheld camera in their studio, The Rape of Europa is a formal filmic feat that intersperses Europa’s monologue with a speculative, comic matrilineal history, with all characters acted by Mary. Europa, endowed with voice and opinions, is not wholly likeable as she boasts, judges, and lists a litany of food aversions. This is not a simple feminist subversion of a violent birth-of-civilization story; instead, the artists’ The Rape of Europa positions Europa as a semi-aware victim of incredible violence while also critiquing contemporary concepts of agency itself. As visual counterparts to the densely linguistic film, the eight accompanying character works to The Rape of Europa are all life-sized and create an experimental feedback loop of information between the theatrical costuming of the characters, the analog pre-production moments of color that seep into the filmic process through the green screen, and the limericks of the film.
Like the artists’ earlier films, Rand/Goop and The Rape of Europa are stylized black-and-white videos combining painting, performance, poetry, animation, and theatrics amounting to bonafide gesamtkunstwerks. Their films pay homage to legacies of German Expressionism and other early cinema that deployed much of the language of theater through their character positioning, carpentry, and costume work. Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley deploy these aesthetic and methodological modes to at once mimic and parody networks of power and the exhaustive search for utility in language.