Mary Reed Kelly: Artistic Practice, World War I Series, and Narrative Analysis

Biography and Artistic Philosophy of Mary Reed Kelly

  • Background and Origins:

    • Mary Reed Kelly was born in 1979 in Gainesville, South Carolina.

    • She records and produces her artistic works in her studio located in Upstate New York.

    • She has achieved widespread recognition, receiving numerous awards and exhibiting her work across many museums.

  • Core Thematic Focus:

    • Focuses on worldly perspectives, specifically historical narratives surrounding World War I, female experiences, politics, and social structures.

    • Addresses the historical reality that women's trauma and voices have repeatedly been left out of history books.

    • Utilizes artistic imagination to recover lost history and bring attention to forgotten aspects of World War I.

  • Artistic Philosophy and Mediums:

    • Creates video art that integrates painting, installation, live performance, and structured poetry.

    • Views video art similarly to classical paintings, designing her pieces so that viewers can return to them repeatedly and discover new elements each time.

Aesthetic Approach, Production Process, and Artistic Style

  • Visual Aesthetics and Animation:

    • Works exclusively in black and white, avoiding color to emphasize animation, movement, and facial expressions.

    • Applies makeup, body paint, and elaborate costumes to perform roles herself within her videos.

    • Costume designs range from doll-like to off-beat and visually distinct, creating deliberate dramatic detail.

  • Scriptwriting and Production Planning:

    • Scripts are highly structured, organized, and meticulously planned.

    • Incorporate rigorous background research, such as mapping out the historical layout of Paris for set design and backgrounds.

    • Combines dark historical themes (trauma, disease, war, prostitution) with rhyming scripts, puns, comedy, and playful rhythms.

  • Collaborative Dynamics:

    • Collaborates with her husband, Patrick Kelly, who acts as a biographer for her artistic pieces and assists in creation.

    • Prefers casting her siblings in performance roles due to feeling comfortable directing them.

Key Artistic Works and Analysis

  • The Queen's English (2008):

    • Context: Part of her World War I video series.

    • Setting & Protagonist: Features a nurse working in a field hospital during World War I.

    • Central Themes: Death, trauma, physical suffering, and the function of language during wartime.

    • Linguistic Analysis: Demonstrates how formal rhetoric, language, wordplay, and puns can obscure, soften, or hide traumatic experiences and battlefield reality.

    • Historical Perspective: Gives voice to wartime nurses whose perspectives and experiences were historically unrepresented.

  • You Make Me Ill (2010):

    • Context & Characters: A fictional narrative set during World War I featuring soldiers, medical officers, and sex workers.

    • Purpose: Highlights the absence of historical accounts documenting women who suffered during World War I.

    • Tone & Themes: Uses rhyming dialogue and comedic rhythm to address heavy topics, including trauma, sexuality, and female wartime experience.

  • The Syphilis Sisyphus (2011):

    • Setting & Protagonist: Centered on Sisyphus, a young sex worker living in 19th-century Paris.

    • Narrative Arc: Follows Sisyphus moving through Paris while engaging in extended polemical musings on art, sex, appearance, and societal structures.

    • Institutionalization: Depicts Sisyphus suffering from syphilis and being placed in an asylum to be treated for "hysteria."

    • Historical Allusions: References major French historical figures, including Marie Antoinette and Napoleon.

    • Socio-Political Critique:

      • Critiques how women's lives were controlled by property laws, societal standards, and patriarchal expectations.

      • Contrasts natural beauty with artificial appearances, examining the socio-economic weight placed on cosmetics, clothing, and external looks in the 19th century versus modern society.

      • Highlights the harsh survival conditions for women in 19th-century Paris, including disease, repeated pregnancies, and systemic neglect.

Script Analysis and Monologue Excerpt

  • Performance Details:

    • The opening scene of The Syphilis Sisyphus features the protagonist doing her toilette and applying makeup in front of a mirror.

    • The emotional tone specified for the performance is not sweetly sad or resignedly sad, but rather bitter, pouting sadness.

    • The visual aesthetic produced by the character's reflection and styling evokes surrealist imagery reminiscent of René Magritte.

  • Verbatim Script Excerpt from The Syphilis Sisyphus:

    • "Nature sold me a lie, and I've kept the deceit on my face to remind me her falsehoods repeat like the seasons renew. Same advice every time because nature can counsel me, nothing but crime."

    • "Her utopian swindles profess to be cures, but infect generations, while smeared with manure as a young naive milkmaid, in apron and braids, I too was revolting on top of the barricades, praising the rustic I fell to gourmet, and my radical urges were lost due to negligee."

    • "Shamed by this lapse into luxury's error, I hid my defections till this happy mirror revealed a new cause for which Sisyphus shoulders the burdens of charm crying, make beauty bolder."