Remembering Kelly Mark
By MOMUS
March 25, 2025
The artist Kelly Mark, prolific and beloved, left us on February 21, 2025. In spending time with her art these past weeks, I have found that there are so many possible entrances in her work for talking about her exit. To begin with, there is the literal EXIT sign morphed into a koanlike EXIST (2009) that has us confronting the “is-ness of existence,” as the curator Robin Metcalf put it. There is the tally mark—four vertical lines crossed by a horizontal line—that Mark adopted as her logo (also a play on her name) and even made into wallpaper (12345 Wallpaper, 1999/2000). Every year on her birthday she would add another hash-mark tattoo to her body, like a prisoner’s count. With I Really Should . . . (2002), an audio recording, Mark’s voice is heard listing all the things desired and unlikely; incredibly, in 2010 that work was overdubbed on a Dutch techno track called “I Really,” which even made a list of top-ten songs in Europe that summer. I love to think of her voice ringing out in eternity over some darkly glittered dance floor, reckoning with her lives not lived. Then there is her masterpiece, 108 Leyton Ave (2014), a video work in which the artist has an eternal conversation with herself over a table set with a desk clock, cards for playing solitaire, endless cigarettes running down to the butt, and some bourbon. All that’s missing is a skull…
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Featured image: Kelly Mark, Trying to Remember, Sometimes Wishing I Could Forget, 1996/2016. Courtesy the Estate of Kelly Mark.