Overview
As the culmination of the artists’ two-year residency, Blood Moon debuts a new body of work that synthesises performance, immersive installation, drawings, and sculpture across two floors of The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM).
As the culmination of the artists' two-year residency, Blood Moon debuts a new body of work that synthesises performance, immersive installation, drawings, and sculpture across two floors of The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM).
Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley are celebrated for video works featuring a distinctively graphic black-and-white palette and scripted narratives in rhyming verse full of punning wordplay by characters brought to life onscreen by Mary. Centred around two new film works-Blood Moon and I'm Jackson Pollock-the exhibition explores the mechanics of power and its fallibility, each film presented in an immersive world and experienced through a darkly funny lens.
In this world they have created, Mary and Patrick explore the nature of human relations in films where all of the characters have pumpkin heads-an ironically comedic twist that belies the violence of this imagined world in films grappling with the complexities and limits of desire. The first film of the exhibition, Blood Moon, explores interpersonal relationships in a scene inspired by Lennie and Curley's Wife from John Steinbeck's seminal 1937 novella, Of Mice and Men. What initially appears as an exchange between new lovers takes a turn for the tragic and results in the gruesome yet comic end for our protagonists. The second, a monologue work titled I'm Jackson Pollock, brings to life the bombastic character embodiment of societal power, callowly hurling boastful claims in rhyming verse. The immersive installation is populated with props, sculptures, and projections that fill the world developed by the artists.
To accompany the exhibition, FWM will publish a fully-illustrated catalogue designed by Purtill Family Business with essays by project curator Alec Unkovic; Jackie Murray, Associate Professor of Classics in the Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures Department at the University of Kentucky; Kathy Noble, Senior Curator & Head of Curatorial Affairs at Performa; Jenelle Porter, independent curator and former Senior Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Robert Storr, curator, scholar, and Artistic Director of the 52nd Venice Biennale; Catherine Wood, Senior Curator of International Art (Performance) at Tate Modern; and a foreword by Christina Vassallo.
Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley: Blood Moon has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. This project has also been supported in part by The National Endowment for the Arts.
