Kelly Mark: Couples
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Pete & Devon - 2006
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Dave
& Roula - 2006 |
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A young couple shares stories about each other and their relationship. Each video depicts the relationship from one point of view and each story differs slightly due to the individual memories of each person.
Originally this work was created specifically for concurrent exhibitions held in Saint John (3rd Space) and Moncton (Galerie Sans Nom) New Brunswick in 2006. The two videos were shown separately, one at each location, taking the rumination of time, space and distance between people and memory to actual physical and geographical lengths.exhibition history> (in whole or in parts)
2006 Gallerie Sans Nom (Moncton NB); 2006 Third Space (St. John NB); 2006 The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Toronto ON); 2007 Kinz, Tillou & Feigen (NY); 2008 Owens Art Gallery (Sackville NB);
"Devon, and its companion piece Pete, continue Mark's careful observation of the everyday, and her subtle manipulation of how we, the viewers, understand that everyday quality. Devon, in Saint John, is a video projection. On the screen a young man looks at the camera, awkwardly patting a black and white cat. The setting is Mark's apartment, the cat is hers - familiar to those knowledgeable about Mark's other videos. The young man is answering questions from an off camera interlocutor, simple queries into his relationship with a woman named Devon such as 'how did you meet Devon?", "what do you love about her?", "what bothers you about her?" and so on. His responses are obviously unscripted, just as he is equally obviously not a trained actor. The subject is human relationships; specifically that between a man and a woman. There are no insights or rare wit, no confessional scenes, and no harrowing tales. It's just some guy talking about some absent girl. Despite its innocuousness, the video is compelling. One gets drawn in, perhaps by the lack of artifice as mush as anything else. However, that lack is not as spare as it seems: the companion piece exsists, after all, and while one was watching Devon, the subject of the video was answering the same questions in the video Pete, part of an exhibition at Galerie Sans Nom in Moncton. The conversation is thus sundered, physical distance standing in for the existential gulf between people.
That gulf is perhaps the main subject of Mark's recent work, the innerness of being human. In Mark's work, life is a repetition of an endless series of everyday acts, and whether or not they are acted out in public, there is an inner core of the private. How we pass the time in our heads is the inexhaustible source of Mark's creative imagination"
- Ray Cronin
(from "Kelly Mark: Everyday People" (exhibition essay, 3rd Space Gallery. Saint John, NB. 2006
Pete & Devon - 2006
Installation View: "We Can Do This Now"
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto 2006-07
photo credit: Rafael Goldchain
