PAF002Gerard & Kelly, Relay (Powder Mountain), 2023

Paris-based American artists Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly have collaborated for nearly two decades on performance, film, installation, and public artwork. With a background in ballet, visual art, and literature, Gerard & Kelly apply conceptual strategies to art and dance. Their work touches on themes of memory, history, and identity, and they work with an extraordinarily diverse range of collaborators. Much of their work questions exclusion and bias in public and private space, and from the casting of their performances to formal strategies they employ, they aim to create radically inclusive works where everyone can find their place.

Relay is an installation of tinted strips of vinyl customized to the dimensions and distribution of existing windows in a given space. Articulating the movement of light as it travels across the floor and walls, Relay transforms the space into a polychromatic sundial, a machine for keeping time. Each window is assigned a color, corresponding to the palette of monochromatic costumes worn by dancers in performances of Gerard & Kelly’s ongoing project Modern Living.

Relay references choreographer and artist Trisha Brown’s 1971 Roof Piece, where dancers each take their turns mimicking short movement sequences performed by another dancer on another rooftop some distance away. Imitation is a basic method of learning for children as well as dancers and a fundamental mode of communication—it is also through initiating movement that most people learn to ski. Relay’s installation on Powder Mountain is further informed by Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973-76), a key work of land art created in the Great Basin Desert that uses large concrete tubes to create a solar observatory, framing the sun as it rises and sets during the summer and winter solstices. Gerard & Kelly clad the ski carpet canopy with a rainbow pattern of spiraling colored light that beginning skiers are magically pulled through on their way up the hill. The experience of the work shifts with the overall light and weather conditions, heightening each rider’s awareness of their environment and creating a playful, uplifting, and inclusive start to their day.

Brennan Gerard (b. Piqua, OH, 1978) and Ryan Kelly (b. Drums, PA, 1979) were both Van Lier Fellows of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and later each received an Interdisciplinary Studio MFA at UCLA. Their first solo exhibition in a European institution, Ruins, was presented at the Carré d’Art – Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes (2022–2023). Recent exhibitions and performances of their work have been presented by Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris (2025), Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence (2024), and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2023). They have also participated in the NGV Triennial, Melbourne (2023), the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2017, 2023), and the Made in L.A. Biennial at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014). Their works are held in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; LACMA, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Carré d’Art, Nîmes; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.