Gerard & Kelly: Panorama
Gerard & Kelly: Panorama
Marian Goodman New York | 1 November - 20 December 2022
Paris-based artists Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly have collaborated for nearly two decades on performance, video, and installation, amongst other formats. With an academic background rooted in ballet, visual art, literature, and gender studies, Gerard & Kelly apply conceptual strategies to art and dance. Through this, they examine themes of memory, history, sexuality, and identity that are fundamental to their practice. As with the work on view, these themes are often set against a particular architectural space, pushing the building's related sociocultural and political precedents into an open engagement with the artists' work.
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The exhibition will present the U.S. debut of Panorama (2021), a video installation described by the artists as “a hybrid between a dance film and a cinematographic essay.” The video takes place within the historic site of the Bourse de Commerce in Paris and follows the fever dream of three characters—Memory, Avenir [Future], and Allegory (respectively performed by Soa de Muse, recently seen in Drag Race France, alongside Guillaume Diop and Germain Louvet of the Paris Opera Ballet.) Throughout the 22-minute video, featuring music by the late composer Julius Eastman, the muses lead the viewer through turbulent arcs of choreography created largely in response to the content within the 360-degree frieze adorning the late-19th-century rotunda. At one moment, Memory begins frenetically narrating scenes of the colonialist narrative that wraps above her, observing such imagery as, “a leopard, a quarry, an Indian chief protecting his face, two indigenous children holding hands, [and a] mother.”
Recently restored for the Pinault Collection that now occupies the Bourse, the panoramic mural portrays a once-thriving European economy that embodied modernization, industrial capitalism, and a past world order. Throughout the work, the three performers contend with this explicit, unified depiction of Western power by enacting abstract choreographies and queer intimacies that fracture traditional perceptions of time, space, and collective memory.
Gerard & Kelly’s first museum survey exhibition, Ruins, is currently on view at Carré d'Art – Musée d'art contemporain de Nîmes through 26 March 2023. A catalogue edited with Mousse Magazine accompanies the exhibition which features an essay by art historian Miwon Kwon and a conversation between Lou Forster and the artists.
Brennan Gerard (b. Piqua, OH, 1978) and Ryan Kelly (b. Drums, PA, 1979) were both Van Lier Fellows of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and later each received an Interdisciplinary Studio MFA at UCLA. Recent solo exhibitions and performances of their work have also been held at MAMCO Genève (2020), MOCA, Los Angeles (2020), Festival d'Automne, Paris (2017 and 2019), The Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2019), Pioneer Works, New York (2018), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016), New Museum, New York (2014), and The Kitchen, New York (2014). Recent group exhibitions include FRAC Franche-Comté, Besancon (2022), Chicago Architecture Biennial (2017), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014), and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014), among others. Their works are held in the permanent collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; FRAC Franche-Comté, and Carré d'Art - musée d'art contemporain de Nîmes.