NYAB Event - Mary Kelly Exhibition

Mary Kelly Exhibition

Postmasters Gallery

This event has ended.

Kelly’s project-based work has addressed questions of sexuality, identity and memory for more than four decades. Her large-scale narrative installations, including Post-Partum Document, 1973-79, Interim, 1984-89, The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi, 2001 and Love Songs, 2005-07, have blurred the boundaries between the personal and the political by visualizing the impact of historical events on the precarious nature of everyday life. The new projects continue to mine the reservoir of collective memory and examine the claim it makes on the present.

Habitus, made in collaboration with Ray Barrie, recounts memories of the generation born during, or just after, the Second World War. The sculpture itself is based on the Anderson Shelter, a mass-produced bomb shelter designed
for home use during air raids in Britain. The worldwide preoccupation with shelters persisted throughout the Cold War and further resonates with the security obsessions of the present day.

The shelter is ‘corrugated’ with anecdotal texts that are legible only by looking ‘underground’ into a mirrored floor, merging the uncanny domesticity of the garden shed with the hallucinatory space of nuclear annihilation. Habitus looks back to what Kelly calls ‘the political primal scene,' that is, to the question of origins beyond the sexual scenario, and asks how transformative, and often violent, world events shape identity in the first few years of life.

Presented as a mini docu-drama in three acts, Kelly’s second project, Mimus, taps into the farcical underbelly of Cold War ideology epitomized by public hearings in the era of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The work takes the ephemeral form of compressed lint. It involves a durational process in which individual units are cast in the filter screen of a domestic dryer over several months and hundreds of washing cycles, then assembled as large panels of intaglio text.

The dialog in Mimus is based on the testimonies of Blanche Posner, Ruth Meyers and Dagmar Wilson, activists in Women Strike for Peace, who initiated lobbies, petitions, vigils, and most famously, demonstrations against nuclear testing in sixty U.S. cities on November, 1, 1962. Their efforts were instrumental in prompting President Kennedy to sign the Test Ban Treaty of 1963, and the hearing led to widespread ridicule of McCarthyism in the media. Perhaps most importantly, WSP’s inclusive “unorganization,” as they called it, set a precedent for the non-hierarchical strategies of second wave feminism as well the Occupy movement today. The radical peace initiatives of women in the early post-war period have been largely forgotten, and Kelly’s excavation of the hearing (U.S. Doc. 2.791) is a performative act of remembering that concerns the materialization of historical affect as much as fact.