The exhibition SIDEWAYS INTO THE SHADOWS contains two separate but related bodies of work that are based on John Kelly’s personal and professional history.

The horizontally mounted memorial wall of portraits is comprised of 54 mixed media drawings on paper mounted on aluminum panels—renderings of both friends and lovers, that were part of Kelly’s life and creative circles—including such cultural luminaries as Sam Wagstaff, Hugh Steers, Peter Hujar, Cookie Mueller, Charles Ludlam, and Ethyl Eichelberger, as well as other individuals whose legacies have received less attention. As a survivor of the AIDS epidemic, Kelly pays tribute to the men, women, and trans folk who held crucial and supportive roles in his life and work as it unfolded over the past 36 years.

The second part of SIDEWAYS INTO THE SHADOWS is based on the writings and drawings contained in Kelly’s personal journals and professional workbooks. These 50 hand-rendered transcriptions of dated journal entries are drawings in graphite, pastel and pigment pencil on various sized frosted acrylic panels, and paper on aluminum panels, installed as a fractured timeline.
As Kelly explains, “Creating this exhibition has been a way for me to process the entire range of how my personal experiences and the arc of my artistic career intertwined into a coherent whole during a time that was both exhilarating and tragic.”