“We’re very interested in this notion of the house as a blueprint for memory.” — Ryan Kelly
For more than two decades, Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly have worked between performance, film, architecture, choreography, and installation, creating artworks where bodies become instruments for remembering. Their practice explores memory, intimacy, history, and the spaces that hold them—often activating architecture as a living participant rather than a static backdrop.
In Gerard & Kelly’s work, movement becomes a form of writing. Buildings become archives. Performance becomes a method of uncovering histories that remain embedded within walls, gestures, and collective memory.
State of floats the question of American identity through citations and transformations of the U.S. flag and the national anthem. Moving on and off the pole; boosting, raising and resting the flag; and singing and re-singing the national anthem, three performers interrogate symbols of nationalism, emptying them of their violence and exploring how they might be reclaimed today. State of features Forty Smooth, a longtime collaborator with Gerard & Kelly and one of the innovators of subway pole riding – a 21st-century dance form developed in the New York City subways.
In the Glyphs series, Gerard & Kelly transcribe fragments of composer Julius Eastman’s handwritten scores onto silk-screened images of dancers from recent films and performances. Captured in glyph-like gestures, dancers shimmer like holograms while musical notations flicker in silver and gold leaf. Eastman’s layered practice of embedding politics within abstraction and combining multiple musical forms is a touchstone for the artists’ own hybrid approach to artistic production.
Gerard & Kelly remind us that memory is never fixed. It moves through architecture, through ritual, through the choreography of bodies inhabiting space. Their works exist between monument and performance, transforming sites into living records where history is not observed from a distance, but continuously rewritten through presence.
For OfToil Archive, these plates preserve three recurring concerns that define the studio’s practice: the body as archive, architecture as witness, and movement as a language capable of carrying memory across time.
photo credits: Gerard & Kelly
