Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to announce an exhibition of video works by Mary Reid Kelley. The exhibition will feature two recent pieces -- The Queen’s English and Sadie, the Saddest Sadist -- in which the artist combines live-action video with stop-motion animation. This will be Reid Kelley’s first one-person exhibition in New York.

Set during the First World War, Reid Kelley’s work draws on the era’s poetry and popular verse, which chart a profound crisis in language and meaning. New technologies that devastated bodies and unsettled long-standing social roles were matched by modern art forms that expressed the fragmentation of culture itself. The upheaval of this historical moment serves as both setting and structural model for the artist’s videos.

Reid Kelley’s characters, alternating among nurse, sailor, and factory worker, speak in a public, rhymed language whose formal constraints erode their authority as individuals. Their meanings slip further through euphemisms, clichés, and puns, trapping them between tragic and comic registers.