EVERYTHING AND NOTHING

The Darling Foundry is pleased to present, as part of the group exhibition Drinkers of Quintessences, the performance Everything and Nothing (2013) by Canadian conceptual artist Kelly Mark, performed in duo with the artist Dean Baldwin Lew.

The work features a dialogue on every subject under the sun between a man and a woman (the artist herself), in an exercise of style between two contradictory expressions that end up intermingled. Freely mixing about a hundred aphorisms and advertising slogans, organized roughly in alphabetical order, Everything and Nothing reveals the irony of our difficulty with grasping the nuances of the “rules” that govern our daily behaviours, as well as the subversive admixtures of philosophical thought and marketing claims.

This performance is related to another of Mark’s works in the exhibition: The Kiss (2007), a video sculpture composed of two CRT television sets placed screen to screen on a human-height platform. A pink-tinted monochromatic image, borrowed from the glow emanating from pornographic movies, runs on both screens, which are touching – a contact resembling a kiss.