Mary Reid Kelley: Swinburne's Pasiphae, Pilar Corrias

Pasiphae gave birth to a monster. Cursed by the Gods with an insatiable carnal desire for a bull, the Queen of Crete sated her lust and birthed the Minotaur. The myth was taken up the Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, whose work on the subject was never published. Kelley takes up the thread here in order to explore the tragic position of women trapped inside narratives that illustrate the fine line between heroine and Jezebel. 
Kelley has a gift for weaving the comic into the tragic. Her scripts are full of puns, poetry and parody. She often plays the central character of her films herself, heavily made-up and participating in a burlesque world of imagery that is both highly stylized and frequently sexualised. What emerges from her highly entertaining works is a sensibility that is beautiful and disturbing. There is an acute sympathy for the rudderless victims of fate, underwritten by an exploration of the cultural and historical construction of that fate. Trust us; this is going to be a great show.