John Kelly, acclaimed performance and visual artist from New York City, is in Rome where he’s spending his time making stunningly beautiful photographs and videos as part of a project called Inhabiting the Skin of Caravaggio.
What muse leads a contemporary artist to experiment with time travel in order that he might inhabit the skin of a seventeenth-century artist? For John Kelly, the Caravaggio project is one that exercises all the mind and body skills he’s developed over the course of a highly successful career. Trained as a dancer, a visual artist, and a singer, John is an innovative performer who spent the 1980s appearing in New York’s East Village Clubs where he was celebrated for bringing to life a fabulous drag queen named Dagmar Onassis (the purported love child of Marie Callas and Aristotle Onassis). Among other achievements, John has perfected a sort of “spiritual osmosis” that allows him to channel the musical talents of Joni Mitchell; he has transformed himself into the artist Egon Shiele; he has appeared on Broadway and starred in countless theater and dance performances; he has been awarded two Bessies, two Obies, the American Choreographer Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship - and that’s saying nothing about his life-long habit of painting self-portraits.
So why Caravaggio and why now? John first encountered Rome’s Baroque Bad Boy when he found himself face-to-face with a painting of the Supper at Emmaus. Utterly impressed by the theatrical elements of the painting, John immersed himself in the study of Caravaggio and has now begun to reinterpret the artist’s paintings in photographs and in video, substituting himself into the compositions in place of Caravaggio’s subjects, and using a few modern props and a simply-furnished studio to replicate Caravaggio’s dark and stagy settings.
The challenge for John - and one at which he is extraordinarily adept given his long stage career - is that of “finding” the poses assumed by Caravaggio’s models. Both process and product are recorded in his artwork. Each time John explores a painting he begins with a video-recorded, graceful, dance-like bodily search for a physical position that captures the drama of Caravaggio’s own composition. Still images taken from the videos are lush and haunting: they suggest a climatic end to the corporal hunt for pose and they record the very moment at which the artist fulfills his desire to inhabit Caravaggio’s skin.
While in Rome, John is resident at the American Academy. His autobiography is published by 2wice Arts Foundation and Aperture. For more information check his website.
