Harry Thorne is a writer and editor based in London, UK. He is associate editor of Frieze and a contributing editor of The White Review. In 2017, he was shortlisted for the International Awards for Art Criticism.
Mary Reid Kelley, Patrick Kelley and Harry Thorne
July 2019
Artists Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley were joined in conversation by writer, editor and critic Harry Thorne to discuss their new commission Rand/Goop at Studio Voltaire.
“… Mary and Patrick’s films are post-mortem parodies: disjointed variations on a theme that sees repetition deployed at an ironic remove. Under a metahistorical guise, they pounce upon the various hidden tyrannies of the contemporary age and, in making them equal parts legible and ludicrous, unveil their deep-set problematics. Call it Brechtian distancing with a burlesque twang.”
– Harry Thorne, The Burlesque Worlds of Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley, Frieze, 2018.
Mary Reid Kelley (b. USA, 1979) received her BFA from St. Olaf College, Minnesota, and an MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2009. She is the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Grant, has received awards from the American Academy in Rome, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and the Guggenheim Fellowship.
Patrick Kelley (b. USA, 1969) earned a BFA from St. Olaf College, Minnesota, and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan. His works have been exhibited at the Bibliothèque Publique d’Information–Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany, and the Minnesota Museum of American Art.
Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley have collaborated since 2008. Recent solo exhibitions include: Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley – We Are Ghosts, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (2017); Mary Reid Kelley, MUDAM Luxembourg (2017); We’re Wallowing Here In Your Disco Tent, The High Line, New York (2016); Mary Reid Kelley, M – Museum Leuven, Leuven (2016); A Marquee Piece of Sod – The WWI Films of Mary Reid Kelley, Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen (2016); Hammer Projects: Mary Reid Kelley, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015); Swinburne’s Pasiphae, Pilar Corrias, London (2014); Mary Reid Kelley, Neuer Kunstverein Wien, Vienna (2014); and Mary Reid Kelley, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA), Boston (2013).