Invisible Personas

By Joan Marie Kelly

Emanating from a university teaching position in Singapore, artist Joan Marie Kelly navigates an interwoven view of complex community relations with her own status as foreigner by engaging communities with art making.

Kelly connects the reader in an intimate visual narrative of lived realities through her paintings and text, immersing the reader or viewer in humanist levels of the world she navigates. She speaks to the global condition, giving it poignancy. Four scholars who have worked with Kelly closely have written essays examining the visual art and developmental processes and have lived interwoven relationships she immersed herself and others.

Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, a cultural theorist; artist Sarah Schuster, teacher at Oberlin College; Pamela Karimi, an Iranian art historian; and David Cohen, a prominent art critic in New York City, have all written from four distinct perspectives about years of artwork made by an artist deeply involved in the communities surrounding her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781546250678

Joan Marie Kelly

Joan Kelly connects the reader with intimate visual narratives of lived realities through her paintings and text, immersing the reader in the personal lives of the worlds she navigates. She speaks to the global condition, by facilitating encounters between neglected communities in shunned spaces, and advantaged university students. Four scholars who have worked with Kelly closely, have written essays examining the developmental processes and visual art that reflects the lived relationships she immerses herself and others. Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, a cultural theorist; visual artist Sarah Schuster and teacher at Oberlin College; Pamela Karimi, an Iranian art and architecture historian; and David Cohen, a prominent art critic in New York City, have all written from four distinct perspectives about years of artwork made by an artist deeply involved in the communities surrounding her.

Book preview

© 2019 Joan Marie Kelly. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse    06/25/2019

ISBN: 978-1-5462-5066-1 (sc)

               978-1-7283-0194-5 (hc)

            978-1-5462-5067-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number:    2018908131

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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Contents

Tracing Reciprocity:    The Portrait Paintings of Joan Marie Kelly

Between Ethnography and Activism: A Note on the Interventionist Art of Joan Marie Kelly

When the Subaltern Speaks: Reflections on the Participatory Art of Joan Marie Kelly

Invisible Personas

Jeanne d’Arc Series: Unprecedented drought, fires, and the loss of 1,500- year old trees

Night Life in Beijing

Doors Locked: Girls in Fez Morocco

The Kolkata Women’s Dialogue

Social Painting

A Note on Process

Painting as Social Art

Joan Marie Kelly

Invisible Personas

This catalogue was made possible with the generous support

from Nanyang Technological University.

Tracing Reciprocity: The Portrait Paintings of Joan Marie Kelly

by Sarah Schuster

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    Representational and illusionistic painting has defined the canon of western art for centuries. Given the Feminist and Post-Modern critiques of the genre, it has been difficult for artists to trust that the traditions of oil painting can still be relevant in the 21st Century. Writers and theorists have emphasized paintings’ symbiotic tie to the objectification of the female body, pointing out how inequities related to race, class and gender are ensconced in the medium, and how the social and political hierarchies of western culture are embedded in the form. In addition, the authenticity of painting is challenged due to its easy co-optation by the market. The sensuality and physicality of paint has been equated with the now unfashionable notions of the sublime, the visceral qualities of the body, and the sensorial responses to the world that run counter to the aesthetic of cool cynicism monopolizing contemporary art. The formal strategies of western painting that positioned the subject as object and denied its interiority have been exposed, but mainstream discourse has not yet tackled the notion of the gaze as a means of mediation between self and other. Little attention has been paid to the capacity of sight to forge relationships or to build reciprocal understanding between self and other, but Joan Marie Kelly’s work uses the canvas as a site of mediation and invites us to speak about the canons of figure and portrait painting through a different lens.

    We recognize ourselves in the other and the other in ourselves and portrait lets us engage in the process of recognition and identification. The most complex and meaningful portraits are a record of the sitter and artist navigating the unknown territory of relationships. What we gaze upon is drawn to look back at us.    This is a remarkable property of vision. As the painter looks, she draws the sitter to look back and both engage in the process and experience of the other. In the end, the portrait is neither artist or subject, but both and something new. Perceptual painting is driven by the artist’s need to engage with the unknowable with something beyond the confines of herself. Kelly speaks to this, saying, Through observation and conversation I come to know something of the sitter. As the portrait develops I discover parts of the model within myself, similarities that then highlight our differences. I come to know the model through relationship and the painting is what we are together… it is something new and never complete. Our relationship becomes a third entity, unfixed but connected to our encounter and then this takes on an endless sequence of relationships each time the painting is viewed. We might describe Kelly’s paintings as a space rather than an object, or a boundary where crossings are recorded.

    Joan Marie Kelly does not fit the image of the angst-ridden and isolated artist often promoted by the history of western-European Romanticism. In 1983, she was living in New York City and attending art school while waitressing part-time to support herself. She began a friendships with several Indonesians she worked with. They did not have proper work visas and, as a result, were unable to return home to their families. They asked Kelly to travel to Indonesia and bring photographs, letters and money to their families in Java. Traveling to Indonesia moved her across continents and across economic, geographic, and racial boundaries. Kelly brought the material to the Indonesian families. As a painter, she used her work as a means of negotiating the world she entered. Carrying the important documents and material to the families in Java catalyzed the role her painting process would serve in the future, and changed her in profound ways. She painted portraits of the people she met