b. 1980. From Barre, Massachusetts. Living and working in Lexington, KY.
BIO
Forest Kelley is an Associate Professor at the School of Art and Visual Studies at the University of Kentucky in Lexington (USA). Channeling documentary impulses, Kelley's work is an effort to comprehend events dislocated from public view, lost to the past, or shaped by oral history and mythmaking. His work reflects on overlooked and introspective histories, harnessing innovative techniques to illuminate vital stories. He has exhibited internationally at venues including 1708 Gallery (Richmond, VA), ClampArt (New York, NY), Filter Space (Chicago, IL), Rotterdam Photo (Rotterdam, Netherlands), SF Camerawork (San Francisco, CA), and Veddel Space (Hamburg, Germany). In 2022, his artist video Supply Air / Return Air screened at venues including Zou-no-hana Terrace (Yokohama, Japan), Bierumer School (Bierum, Netherlands), and Pier2 Artcenter (Kaohsiung, Taiwan). He also released the full-length experimental album Silt on the label ENXPL (Enmossed + Psychic Liberation). He received the 2020 Imagemaker Award from the Society for Photographic Education. In 2018, he contributed music to the Academy Award–nominated and Criterion Collection–selected documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, for which he received a Peabody Award and the award for Best Music Score from the International Documentary Association.
STATEMENT
My work considers how personal psychology lives within a social ecology. It is an endeavor to comprehend events and experiences lost to the past or augmented through oral history and mythmaking. The surface reminds us that an artwork is a stand-in, that representation has limits. Photographs don’t cure amnesia, they attempt to fill in the gaps. It is the process of reenactment, an action of tracing history, that is most vicarious: wearing a sequined dress at the Ruby Red Ball, listening to opera with Greg, developing film in a lab at Castro and 18th, feeling where testicles are situated under a corset, receiving my uncle’s postcard in the mail, dated 1978, that said:
I think I learned a little bit about Eden....
See you in the future,
Love Michael Kelley
