Mary Kelly

Mary Kelly’s Circa 1968, 2004, renders a famous photo from May ’68: a woman in a crowd waving a Vietnamese flag, resembling Delacroix’s Liberté. In her “Circa Trilogy,” Kelly positions this formative political tableau between two others: a photograph of a library ruptured in the London Blitz, just before her birth—Circa 1940, 2016—and a cell-phone snap of May’s stifled echo at Tahrir Square more recently—Circa 2011, 2016. All three are rendered in Kelly’s signature “compressed lint,” cast in low relief on the filter screen of the artist’s dryer then glued to paper cards—duly interpretable as history rammed through the trap of the chore—though the material’s feminist invective, conceptually crucial to the series “Mea Culpa,” 1999, doesn’t stretch to cover the Arab Spring.

There is little here to nuance the mnemonic pathos of photographs, especially ones already so nostalgically overdetermined. The artist’s indexical fluff obliterates detail and gradation from the images’ iconic outlines as surely as the fuzz of leftist romance cushions the real. Yet a corresponding trio of oblique texts—“Unguided Tour c.,” 2016—nonetheless press Kelly’s point. Each begins with “You are here,” a futile attempt to place the viewer at each photograph’s conception. As poetry, the facts suffer: “On a balcony, a banner,” reads Unguided Tour c. 1968; it ends: “Beneath the paving stones, / More than the beach.” More poignant, and a better read, is the incidental poetry of “7 Days,” which takes its title from a radical feminist tabloid to which Kelly contributed in the early 1970s. She has reproduced the front pages of several with brick-like sections of lint. The teasers bannering one, circa 1971, are a tender litany of idealisms: “Miss World / Allende: Year One / Boxing / One Room Sex / Gramsci.”