Exhibition presented in collaboration with Silver Flag Projects

Kelly Mark, HB Series: Take 1 / Take 2 / Take 3, 2010

Artist Kelly Mark gets her inspiration from everyday objects and scenes, which she sends up through futile manipulations. At once humorous and radical, her works poeticize what is inherently banal about our society, while being self-critical about the creative act. Simplistic interventions, unproductive repetitions, collections of useless found objects: while widening the scope of its definition, the artist brings about a questioning of the status of the work of art.

In this sense, Kelly Mark freely reinterprets the specific strategies of various contemporary artistic currents and revisits art history. Working in a wide array of media (sculpture, photography, video, performance, sound pieces), the artist wryly comments on 1960s conceptual and minimal practices characterized by a paucity of artistic content¹ , has fun with textual art and its aphoristic messages conveying pointless truisms, or makes a mockery of technological art with lo-tech installations made up of cheap TV sets.

In Public Disturbance: HB series : take 1/ take 2/ take3, 2010, her latest video work, the artist draws her inspiration from a domestic argument found in a popular film that she has professional actors re-enact in three stages. The three takes were made at different moments of a social reception on Toronto’s art scene², thereby playing on the ambivalence between shooting a film and performance. The scene in question, lasting a few minutes, becomes a spoof of a couple’s ordinary conversation gone awry. Starting with an invitation for lunch, the dialogue gets mired in intimate reflections on the relationship.

The appropriation of famous films from the history of cinema, by selecting and restaging selected excerpts, is a widespread phenomenon in contemporary art. What is Kelly Mark making fun of with the extremely banal passage she chose, having more to do with sociological cliché than with artistic prowess, and with its successive repetition on the occasion of a “glamorous” public event? Does she take aim at the superficiality of human relationships, specifically within couples in this case, or at the coherence of current art practices prone to revisiting film monuments or, more generally, trends in the history of art?

In parallel with her conceptual practice, for a decade now, Kelly Mark has been doing drawing using Letraset, an obsolete transfer technique for preformatted letters and cryptograms, used by graphic artists before the computer revolution. It would seem that the resort to this other medium —an act of détournement of a kind that recurs throughout the artist’s work— is chiefly motivated by the sheer enjoyment of giving a free rein to her innate sense of composition in the transformation of a figurative code into abstraction³.

Kelly Mark got her Fine Arts degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1994. Since then, her works have been shown in Canada, in the United States and overseas and are found in several private and public collections such as the National Art Gallery of Ottawa. The Montreal public had the opportunity to see her works in 2008, at her solo exhibition at Vox Gallery, and more recently, at a performance at DHC-Art in 2009. Kelly Mark is a guest of the Darling Foundry for a month-long residency. She lives and works in Toronto.