Mary Kelly at Postmasters - Brief Article

Art in America, Sept, 1999 by Sarah Valdez

You wouldn't know by looking, but it took over 4,000 pounds of washed and dried fabric to generate the lint that was used to create Mary Kelly's most recent body of work, collectively called "Mea Culpa." Running along the walls of the square gallery were four elongated, rectangularly framed white supports carrying wavelike strips of flecked gray lint. The installation's austere impact turned from Zen to chilling as one approached the pieces to read the words in blocky, capital letters cut through the lint to reveal the white beneath. The texts are brief vignettes composed by Kelly based on media accounts of politically motivated atrocities that recently have been the focus of the International War Crimes Tribunal.

The pieces, titled Phnom Penh 1975, Beirut 1982, Sarajevo 1992 and Johannesburg 1997, include graphic descriptions of pain and loss, along with facts pertaining to an anonymous protagonist referred to as "she." This persona witnesses violence, washes dishes in the midst of rubble, retrieves family photographs from the aftermath of militaristic mayhem and listens stoically in a courtroom to a description of the premeditated slaughtering of activists. By using the same abstract, gendered pronoun, Kelly weaves a common thread through these experiences that has to do with mothers, children, kitchen utensils, bathroom tiles and numbness brought on by inhumane circumstance.

This body of work does more than bring to the fore the female victim of war; it endows the woman with the anonymity that is the hallmark of militaristic and legalistic authority. As the nameless, omnipresent observer of the displays of masculine virility that Kelly deems inherent to violence "she" institutes an alternative morality that allows the vignettes' brutality to be symbolically read as masculine, hierarchical or otherwise pathological.

Kelly confronts dynamics that pertain, as the artist's statement declares, to the "phenomenological process of reading." While our revulsion from war is exacerbated by the linguistic rendering of the mother/wife as faceless, Kelly reveals a power dynamic inherent to the erasure of individual identity, particularly as it relates to the representation of women and soldiers. The depth of meaning of Kelly's intricate and well-formed semiotic and psychological models will most likely be lost on the viewer uninitiated in the ideas of Foucault, Lacan and Theweleit. Even so, she raises the seminal question of where the battleground lies: in action or consciousness?