KELLYWORKS (2023) Two-channel video projected on a double-sided wall flat. With sound. Dimensions variable

A single wall-flat bifurcates the gallery space, both sides of which are projected upon.  On one side of the wall-flat (call it side A) play out highly kinetic movements performed by dancers Brandon Collwes and Donovan Reed in a painting studio that Kelly used until his last days. Sun drenched with warm wood floors, it features a selection of Kelly’s boldly colored works on canvas. The other side of the wall-flat (call it side B) features projections in live slowness featuring the same two dancers in a sky-lit, white cube gallery with polished concrete floors and hung with a selection of Kelly’s black and white paintings. While these contrasting bodies of work play out on opposite sides of the wall, a track of John Cage fragments plays continuously and in randomized fashion such that it never aligns with the moving images in the same way twice, thereby allowing for the possibility of meaning to arrive through informal arrangement, chance happening and the unanticipated alignment of elements. The spectators’ movements between the contrasting two-sidedness of the video installation completes the experience: an ever-changing shape and movement landscape becomes a faceted mystery where the concrete disappears, and an infinity of possibilities emerge from ever-forming new combinations of reductive, simplified forms.  

The work was developed, filmed and first exhibited at the Ellsworth Kelly Studio in Spencertown on May 20th 2023 for the occasion of the Ellsworth Kelly Centennial

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Created in collaboration with Liz Gerring and Richard Colton, KellyWorks takes as its subject both the reflective stillness and kinesthetic curves of Kelly’s objects and paintings, alongside his spirit of work, thought and process. Many decisions in regard to the conceptual strategy and overall design of KellyWorks were informed and inspired by Kelly’s distinctive approach to developing form, particularly, his penchant for finding inspiration in the world around him: a glass roof of a factory with its broken and patched panes, lines of a roadmap, the shape of a scarf on a woman’s head or paper fragments in the street — all were in Kelly’s own words “fair game” and in a certain sense “already made.” The Kelly Studio in Spencertown became fair game for our own work: whether the reflective stillness and kinesthetic curve of a painted form, a discovered non-art object or conversation with Jack Shear (Kelly’s life partner), all were “fair game” to be reduced and transmuted into movement which was then recorded with a static camera to place recorded image closer to painting and sculpture and further away from the camera moment we associate with cinema. 

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KELLYWORKS (2023)

Produced by: Richard Colton  

Installation Design and Direction: David Michalek

Videography: David Michalek

Movement for wall side A (with colored canvases by Ellsworth Kelly): Liz Gerring

Movement for wall side B (with black and white canvases by Ellsworth Kelly): David Michalek

Dancers: Brandon Collwes and Donovan Reed

Music: John Cage

Audio/Video Editing and Post-Production: Jack Colton with David Michalek

Installation Technical Direction: Manu Sawkar with Jack Colton

Special Thanks to Mary Anne Lee, Laura Kuhn, Lauren Shaffer and Jack Spear