lecture: jp kelly

Art and Art History Presents

JEAN-PAUL KELLY

Thursday January 21 /12:30 – 1:30 p.m.

RM: B124

Jean-Paul Kelly (b. 1977, London, Ontario, Canada) is an artist based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals in North America, Japan, and Europe. Gallery TPW (Toronto) presented a solo exhibition of Kelly's recent installation, And fastened to a dying animal, in the fall of 2008. He is Programming Director of Trinity Square Video and a past member of the Pleasure Dome experimental film and video programming collective. Kelly holds a Masters of Visual Studies degree from the University of Toronto (2005).

“Grounded in self-reflection and readings from psychology and film theory, [his work] addresses issues of self-doubt and personal anxiety, seeking to understand and work through a profound sense of “anticipatory melancholia”… Anticipatory melancholy borrows from the phrase “anticipatory grief” … The loss has not yet happened but is inevitable, and all the more devastating for being imminent yet in the future. For Kelly, the term also refers to his everyday anxieties about aging parents, love relationships, and his own eventual demise. But [his work] is also… witty and amusing work of great charm and self-deprecating humour, conjuring wicked pleasure and irony at the very edge of the abyss.” – Peggy Gale, writing on Kelly’s The Lie in Wait (2006) in the University of Toronto MVS Programme Inaugural Graduating Exhibition catalogue.