I Smelled A Raw Recruit: The World War Films of Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley

Saturday 11 August – Sunday 7 October 2018
Still from In the Body of the Sturgeon, 2017; image courtesy of the artists who are represented by Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, New York, Pilar Corrias, London, Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles Projects | I Smelled A Raw Recruit: The World War Films of Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley | Saturday 11 August – Sunday 7 October 2018 | Butler Gallery

The Butler Gallery presents a multimedia exhibition by New York-based artists Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley.

I Smelled A Raw Recruit: The World War Films of Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley brings together the artists’ most recent film, In the Body of the Sturgeon, which follows a doomed submarine crew on its final journey in the Pacific, and three earlier films set on the Western Front of World War I.

The reverberations of these global conflicts are energetically canvassed in the artists’ distinctive combination of animation, painting, performance, and distinctive wordplay-filled poetic scripts. Painted sculptural objects from the sets will accompany the videos, along with two lightbox portraits of characters from Sturgeon, which reveal the detailed painted surfaces of both performer and set. In a submarine, hospital, and a military brothel, Mary and Pat stage dilemmas of mortality, sex, and delusion, navigated by their characters in punning dialogue that traps them between tragic and comic meanings.

Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley’s work is held in many public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hammer Museum Los Angeles; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; and The Zabludowicz Collection, London. Mary Reid Kelley has been awarded many significant awards including the MacArthur Fellowship and the Baloise Art Prize (2016) and the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (2014). The artists have exhibited extensively internationally and in 2017 presented We Are Ghosts, their first museum solo exhibition in the UK at Tate Liverpool, which travelled to the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2018.


PARABLES OF A HIDDEN HISTORY
Mary Reid Kelley & Patrick Kelley in Conversation
3pm, Saturday, August 18th
The Parade Tower, Kilkenny Castle
ADMISSION FREE (UNTICKETED)

Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley will be in conversation with Dr Dara Waldron, Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies at Limerick School of Art and Design, and Butler Gallery Director Anna O’Sullivan.

The discussion will focus on the artists’ approach to filmmaking in the context of satire and the absurd, and will seek to contextualise their practice in relation to recent political developments in the US. The discussion will also focus on the poetics of filmmaking practices.

Image: Still from In the Body of the Sturgeon, 2017; image courtesy of the artists who are represented by Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, New York, Pilar Corrias, London, Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles Projects
Saturday 11 August – Sunday 7 October 2018
Butler Gallery
Evans' Home
John’s Quay, Kilkenny
Telephone: +353 56 7761106
info@butlergallery.com
www.butlergallery.com
Admission / price: Free
Closed 13:00 - 14:00 until March.

 
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