Film

  • Farnsworth/Gray
  • GRANTEE
    Gerard & Kelly:
    Brennan Gerard &
    Ryan Kelly
    GRANT YEAR
    2018

Gerard & Kelly, Modern Living (2016-ongoing), performance view at the Farnsworth House, Plano, IL, presented by the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, September 15–16, 2017. Pictured: Julia Eichten. Photo: Bradley Glanzrock. Courtesy of the artists.

Gerard & Kelly's Modern Living is an ongoing project of performances and videos sited in modernist homes. Structured in chapters, the project utilizes choreographic scores and a changing cast of dancers and musicians to pose the question: What would a home have to look and feel like today to protect and produce relations that do not fit within dominant narratives of domesticity? The first film in the series premiered at the Seattle Art Fair in August 2017. Schindler/Glass captures the artists' interventions at the Schindler House in Los Angeles and the Glass House in New Canaan, CT. Both were homes the architects built for themselves to shelter relationships that were as experimental as their designs. In their new film, Farnsworth/Gray, Gerard & Kelly bring together two iconic homes—Mies van der Rohe's radical statement of domestic architecture in Plano, Illinois, and Eileen Gray's villa E-1027 in the south of France—to explore the legacy of feminist and queer space in modernist architecture.

Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly have collaborated since 2003 as Gerard & Kelly. Their installations and performances use choreography, writing, video, and sculpture to address questions of sexuality, memory, and the formation of queer consciousness. Their work has been exhibited internationally at the Festival d'Automne, Paris; Chicago Architecture Biennial; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Seattle Art Fair; and The Kitchen, New York; among other institutions. Gerard & Kelly completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2010, and received their MFAs in 2013 from the University of California Los Angeles Department of Art. Their projects have been supported by residencies at the National Dance Center, Paris; New Museum, New York; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art; and Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, among others.  They have received numerous recognitions for their work, including the 2014 Juried Award from The Bessies, as well as grants from the National Dance Project, Art Matters, FUSED (French US Exchange in Dance), and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.