Mary Reid Kelley on the January 2015 cover of ARTnews

Reid Kelley is a young artist whose work was recently featured in “Mary Reid Kelley: Working Objects and Videos,” a retrospective jointly organized by the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz and the University Art Museum at SUNY Albany. Reid Kelley, who was born in South Carolina and currently resides in Saratoga Springs, New York, works in collaboration with her husband, artist Patrick Kelley. The films they create riff on commedia dell’arte, German Expressionist movies, and newspaper comic strips, reimagining them in a format that resembles an animated drawing. They leap promiscuously through history and mythology, emphasizing moments when gender roles and social structures were in flux.

The films are largely confined to black and white, with costumes, sets, and props that, even if ready-made, are outlined in thick black lines that give them a cartoonish quality. The characters wear homemade masks or faces painted white with eggs propped in their eye sockets, emphasizing a weirdly skull-like aspect. The narratives are dominated by chatter, as characters spout rapid-fire and often hilarious monologues rife with puns and rhymes. In an interview with blogger Tyler Green, Reid Kelley notes that she uses these devices to undermine the logic of language, embedding a betrayal of meaning in the spoken texts that mirrors the betrayal of reason portrayed in her narratives.

To date, she has completed seven films. The earliest are very short and based on women on the frontlines of World War I, among them a nurse and a munitions worker. These culminated in the more elaborate You Make Me Iliad (2010), which focuses on a female sex worker at the front. Discovering that the primary sources about prostitution in the Great War were all written by men, Reid Kelley accompanied her heroine’s commentary with that of a male soldier and a medical officer who monitored the brothels. Here, as elsewhere in her work, Reid Kelley transforms rather grim source material into playfully satirical skits that mock the unbalanced power structures and stilted gender roles that confine her characters.

Feeling the need to give her heroine more agency, Reid Kelley transported her to the French demimonde in The Syphilis of Sisyphus (2011). The film centers on a pregnant Parisian prostitute who exemplifies Baudelaire’s paean to the superiority of cosmetic over natural beauty. With sets that shift between Sisyphus’s boudoir and the streets of Paris, the work is an antic romp through Revolutionary and post Revolutionary France, with brief vignettes involving everyone from Diderot, Marie Antoinette, and Marat to Robespierre, Napoleon, and Haussmann. In a commentary on the fate of overly aggressive women, it ends with our rebellious heroine carted off to Charcot’s sanatorium.

Reid Kelley is currently at work on a trio of films, two of which have been completed. The first, titled Priapus Agonistes (2013), is very loosely based on the classical Greek myth of the Minotaur. The artist places the now-female monster’s fabled labyrinth in a church basement and transforms the Minotaur’s hunter into Priapus, a minor Greek fertility god. Here he is imagined as the cocky star of a church volleyball team who is egged on by a Greek chorus of contemporary beauty queens. We also get a flashback recounting the seduction of Queen Pasiphae by a bull, a union that lead to the birth of the Minotaur. All characters are played by Reid Kelley herself. The second film in this series, Swinburne’s Pasiphae (2014), returns to the seduction scene, this time reenacting an obscure poetic fragment by the Victorian writer Algernon Charles Swinburne that brings out the insatiable and socially disruptive nature of female desire.

Priapus Agonistes presents sexual politics seen through the simultaneous lens of Greek mythology, 1950s-era American Christianity, and Victorian prudery. History serves as a distorted mirror to suggest the misogyny also at work in contemporary society. And indeed, that is the message that runs through all Reid Kelley’s films.