Remembering Canadian artist Kelly Mark, the 'working-class conceptualist'

It's rare that an artist's work can be summarized in a few words, and rarer still when that artist is prolific in a wide variety of media. Toronto artist Kelly Mark produced sculptures, drawings, photographs, audio, video, performance, text work, tattoos, mail art and multiples, about a myriad of subject matter.

I'm not sure who originated the term "working-class conceptualist" to describe her and her practice, but it was apt enough to follow her throughout her career, and astute enough to withstand scrutiny.

I always understood it to refer to the fact that the work is smart without being smug, funny without being trite, and completely absent of pretence or academic trappings. She brilliantly conflated the repetition of the minimalist and process-based work championed by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design  — where she studied — with the repetitive tasks of so much manual labour.

Sometimes, Mark pushed back against the term ("Working Class My Ass"), but her entire practice could be viewed as a prescient investigation into the mechanisms and rituals of labour. Some random titles include: Smoke Break, Staff & Security, Nine to Five, Working Hard/Hardly Working and Minimum Wage. In that last work, she renegotiated an exhibition contract so that she would be paid the minimum hourly wage while her work was on view. It amounted to a raise.

All in a Day's Work, from 2009, was an eight-hour artist's talk, complete with coffee and lunch breaks. Typically, durational work is about patience, boredom, stamina and maybe transcendence. For Mark, it was a time-keeping device to help get through the work day. She took the "1,2,3,4, stroke" motif — or tally mark — that captives carve into walls and had it produced as rolls of wallpaper. Later, she turned it into a tattoo on her arm, updated annually on her birthday.

In & Out, which became known as her signature piece, might be the earliest example of Mark tying biography to output. Beginning in 1997, the artist routinely punched a vintage time clock at the start of each work day, punching out again eight hours later. "The project will end," she wrote, "in 2032, when I turn 65."

An early statement conveys her unshakeable work ethic, sometimes surly manner and strong distrust for a system that rewards capital and devalues labour:

"I tend to show up late. I usually leave early. I take long breaks. I have issues with authority. I don't follow instructions. I don't work well with others. I drink on the job. I complain a lot. But I'm always working."

The phrase "I don't work well with others" would later be repurposed as "I don't play well with others" for a book bag made with Micah Lexier for their two-person exhibition, Head-to-Head, at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ont. The adjustment evokes the language of a grade-school report card, admonishing the student who prefers to go it alone.

It takes a particular kind of self-awareness to couch one's cantankerous nature in terms more nostalgic than cynical. She would return to this approach several times, including in her final work. 

When I was putting together an exhibition for Mercer Union in Toronto called Infinity, Etc., I thought about her interest in duration and asked Kelly if she had any suitable works. She proposed a red neon sign that read "I called shotgun infinity when I was twelve" in all caps. Whereas the other pieces in the show were about loops, numbers and math, Mark evoked the language of the trump card of a petulant, entitled child — the authority of the large neon letters conferring on herself front-seat privileges for eternity.

Despite the warnings that she didn't work well with others, I found myself collaborating with her on a project that took almost two years and 10,000 hours to complete. I was initially crushed to learn that a video collage I was working on was very similar to one that she had also recently sunk her teeth into. I instantly ceded to her, offering up my research. A couple of days later, she proposed that we produce the piece together. Given that it involved finding film clips that displayed clock faces representing each of the 1,440 minutes of the day, having a partner made the epic task feel slightly more feasible.

We had radically different working methods and frequently disagreed. I felt strongly that the piece must begin at midnight, and she imagined 6 a.m. alarm clocks triggering an opening sequence where people drag themselves out of bed and see themselves off to work.

She was a wellspring of great ideas. She proposed that any instance in which a character moved a clock backward or forward (usually for nefarious purposes, like covering up a crime or getting out of work or school early), the piece would lurch forward or backward accordingly. This meant that we didn't just have to locate one instance of, say, 11:37 p.m., but several. This snakes-and-ladders approach to the film's structure led to her titling the work Time & Again.

We were 81.67 per cent complete (I updated a chart daily to monitor our progress) when we discovered that Christian Marclay had been working on a very similar video, with a blank-cheque budget from his gallerist and a crew of assistants. His work soon premiered to much fanfare, being touted as one of the first masterpieces of the 21st century.

Devastated and demoralized, we spent another six months finalizing our more modest version, and then promptly buried it, pleased at least in the knowledge that it was created to see out a compulsion. Sometimes, you just have to keep working.

She moved away soon after. The threat of her abattoir-adjacent studio building being razed to make way for condos (a common fear for artists in the city) saw her scrape together enough money for a down payment on a modest bungalow in Scarborough. She immediately set about converting it to a studio environment, covering windows to make more wall space, and almost certainly lowering its resale value in the process. While there, she could no longer host the legendary impromptu after-parties she was known for and which I suspect were a bit of a lifeline for her. Most artists in our community didn't own cars and it was a lengthy ride on public transit, leading to far fewer visitors than she was accustomed to.

It was at this address that she created perhaps her last masterpiece, 108 Leyton Ave, a slyly funny and uncharacteristically personal self-portrait. In the split-screen video, Mark is shown sitting at both ends of the kitchen table, drinking, smoking, playing solitaire and talking to herself. It's more of an argument than a conversation, scripted entirely from common expressions relating to everything and nothing. "Everything will be worth it in the end," for example, is countered with, "Nothing ends well; that's why it ends."

When she began to find making mortgage payments difficult, Mark decided to look for more reliable work. An international exhibition history doesn't mean much to a manager at Walmart, so her work resumé showed a gap of over a decade. Combined with her many visible tattoos, prospective employers assumed that she had spent time in prison.

Unable to find work, she sold her home — at a loss — and moved to a north Toronto rental apartment. Health problems persisted and bills mounted, leading to further isolation. The situation became untenable.

Following a final Super Bowl party last month with a small group of close friends, Kelly opted for Medical Assistance In Dying. A quarter-century ago, she said, "I want to experience my death. You don't get to experience your birth and most people don't experience their own death.… I tell people that I love to be alive but I don't think it would be that bad to be dead."

With characteristic gallows humour, her final work was released later that day. It is a text piece that reads: "I DON'T WANNA PLAY THIS GAME ANYMORE. I'M TAKING MY BALL AND GOING HOME."