Known for their stylised black-and-white videos this exhibition will be Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley’s first museum solo exhibition in the UK. The display will feature their new work In The Body of The Sturgeon, as well as the 2016 work, This Is Offal alongside life-size lightbox portraits of the videos’ characters.
Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley work in collaboration to create video works that combine painting, performance and poetry to tell surreal stories inspired by history and mythology. Played by the artists acting multiple roles, their characters speak in poetic verse filled with wordplay and puns to tell stories that imagine unrecorded histories.
The new commission In The Body of The Sturgeon envisions a peculiar time and space: an American submarine at the very end of the Second World War. Sailors on the (fictional) USS Sturgeon grapple with claustrophobic boredom and entertain each other with ad-hoc burlesque performances.
Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley , This Is Offal 2016. Courtesy of the artists and Pilar Corrias Gallery, London.
