Jean-Paul Kelly’s “And fastened to a dying animal” at Gallery TPW

It probably comes as no surprise (given the number of times I’ve posted about their shows on here) that I am a big fan of Gallery TPW and their programming. I am also a big fan of Jean-Paul Kelly, so I’ve had the opening of his solo show at the gallery marked down in my daybook for months now.

Jean-Paul Kelly, When All Is Said and Done [still], 2008

And I was not disappointed by the show, “And fastened to a dying animal,” which features a compelling five-act series of videos made at his parents’ home (Good by Good Acts), a series of crisply accurate, black and white drawings based on photos and rearranged Google images, colour photographs documenting the state of a series of sympathy plants given to his parents three years after their original gifting, and a new digital animation based on a 1948 episode of Casper the Friendly Ghost.

While the video works are personal, touching and even sad, they seem quite candid and manage to never stray into schlocky territory. Kelly is consistently behind the camera in the six-minute acts, rarely allowing his own body to enter the frame, but guiding the lens’ view and perspective and through the house and yard. Despite whatever is going on in the house–from his father’s illness, to the family dog’s surgery–his dialogue with his parents remains familiar, casual and joking. I wondered at first is this was an affected state adopted by the family to put their best face forward for the camera, but Kelly’s documentation seems to act almost like a family camcorder: recording the everyday events and changing seasons in the home, but being screened to the public without the same kind of editing that might affect a home movie or family photo album (although one could argue this kind of editing is also done on-camera by the way the family members behave and the spaces and scenes Kelly decides to give us access to by choosing to film them, for how long and from what perspective).

Kelly’s drawings also walk a careful line between the personal and the public realm, the tragic and the absurd, by depicting animals that have been transformed into couch cushions, couch cushions that are morphing into bones, family stationwagons on fire and piles of sandbags named after different disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, the war in Afghanistan, and the death of Susan Sontag. While the drawings are beautiful to look at, they require a bit of background knowledge to get the full picture of how they tie in to the rest of the work and to each other since all of Kelly’s work is carefully linked by a series of complex and nuanced ideas about the nature of narratives and the role of apocalypse, the differences in filmic and digital time and the role of affect in images of tragedy, suffering and trauma. Jon Davies’ excellent essay that accompanies the exhibition smartly and succinctly draws out these relationships and connections in Kelly’s work and how they came together (seriously, if you read one art text this week, make it this essay).