NEWS FROM HOME, 2017

In News from Home (2017), Kelly asks what defines an era not only as political discourse, but also, as trace, or residue, of the personal lives that were defined by it.  Three letters from the artist’s archive have been recreated in compressed lint. The letters were selected to encapsulate the lived experience of feminists in the early 70s as it filtered through specific exchanges with her friends. Beirut 1970, grapples with sexual politics and the impracticality of applying Sartre’s and Du Beauvoir’s critique of monogamy to everyday life.   London 1974, gives a fleeting glimpse of communal living. Conflicting messages one from the mother, another from a child, invoke the chaos and excitement of women negotiating their commitment to activism with childcare, illness, accidents and domesticity, all as a collective effort.  Tucson 1972, addresses the issues of economic survival and alternative ways of living in the context of protests against the Nixon administration’s escalation of the war in Vietnam.

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