Imaging, Desiring, Remembering Home: Home as a Locus of Meaning in the Works of Mary Kelly
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines selected works by American visual artist Mary Kelly (b. 1941) through the category of the home. Home is theorized both as a physical structure, which shapes female subjects’ identity and their life practice, and a profoundly conflicted symbolic site of struggle that allows for a renegotiation of the social contract. The article reads Kelly’s early works, Antepartum (1973) and Post-Partum Document (1973-79), understanding home as a mytho-physical dwelling place, the mother’s body, which the artist presents as ideologically interpellated and, at the same time, problematized by her own experience. Kelly’s later work, Interim (1984-89), is discussed as juxtaposing received ideas concerning femininity with the voices of women who fail to fulfill them, and thus are rendered symbolically homeless. Symbolic homelessness seems also pivotal to the 1992 Gloria Patri, in which the artist exposes the cultural alienation of women who enter the military. The 1991 Mea Culpa and the 2001 Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi also take up the subject of cultural homelessness. Here, the artist addresses traumatic dimensions of military conflicts, which she understands as tightly connected to the victims’ tattered or lost ethnic and national identity. In the 2005-07 Love Songs, Kelly changes her focus to envision home as a physical and semantic vessel for the 1970s women?s movement voices, which, in her installation, are united by a transparent home-like structure. Finally, in the 2010-12 Habitus, co-authored by Ray Barrie, the artist returns to the subject of home, which, in this case, is profoundly disturbed by the lingering context of the Cold War. This article discusses Kelly’s diverse uses of the home along the lines of art theory, psychology of the object, and feminist criticism (Nancy K. Miller, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva) in order to present their social and political implications. It understands home as evoking (utopian?) associations of eternal return or a desired horizon, towards which the spectators are encouraged to travel both through their memory-work and life-activism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".