About a boy: inspired by the press account of an Albanian child displaced during the Balkan war, Mary Kelly's newest installation considers the roots of nationalism, the origin of gender identity and the power of the word

Art in America, Dec, 2002 by Ernest Larsen

In the interview, Kelly speaks of "filtering out the figurative elements and working with the emotional or affective residue of the event." Lint, of course, is not only the residue of the process of filtering; it is residue as waste product. Insofar as the critical subjectivity of her text is wholly inextricable from the waste within which it appears, Kelly implicitly reiterates the claim, well established in the modernist canon that runs from Dada and early assemblage through process art and Conceptualism, that artistic production can subvert the customary structure of value. Moreover, this particular subversion's association with cleansing chillingly conjures the verbally and physically degraded turn of phrase signified by the term "ethnic cleansing."

Kelly came of age as an artist in London during the early '70s, in the heady intellectual atmosphere of British Minimalism and Conceptualism (prominently Art and Language) and the feminist development of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Her mature work positions the viewer as a reader, and each successive project has offered a new response to the challenges that mark the uneasy relationship between image and text. The depth of her solutions was indicated by what amounted to a mini-retrospective at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, which coincided with the Santa Monica Museum installation. This gallery show also indicated that Kelly's major artistic projects--from Post-Partum Document through Interim (1984-85) to Gloria Patri (1992)--in one way or another investigate the processes by which the subject intersects with a wider history. In the autobiographical Post-Partum Document, there are the dual subjects of mother and son; in Interim, the claims and contradictions of the no-longer-young generation of women who came of age in the watershed year 1968; in Gloria Patri, the social construction of masculinity in the context of the Gulf War.

With the Ballad Kelly recasts the individual's "entry" into language and society as a physical journey. Instead of standing in one place and reading a more or less self-contained text before moving on to the next element, the viewer-reader must continually move along as the uninterrupted line of text extends around the space. This discreetly theatricalized both the story and the space of the museum, a quality that was further heightened by the role granted to performance within the installation.

On the night of the opening, the Ballad was sung to music composed by the minimalist Michael Nyman. The program featured his string quintet and the soprano Sarah Leonard. Unspectacular and intimate, the event nevertheless fully animated the complex themes of the installation. By placing her audience within a context of music and rhetoric, balladry and legend, Kelly symbolically inserted them in the larger construction of nationalism promoted elsewhere by the media. Hers is a pertinent tactic at this moment in history, when extreme patriotic fervor in our own country continues to attend what has been billed as only the first phase of a permanent war on terrorism.