Jay Kelly

The acrylic passages in Kelly's collages do not simply paint over the paper elements — they interact with them, the paint bleeding into the newsprint, the printed text showing through at different opacities depending on how many layers of paint it has received. The final surface holds a record of the decisions made during construction, and reading the painting means reading that record.

His work sits in the tradition of American collage that runs from Rauschenberg's combines through contemporary mixed media practice — a tradition that treats the found material as a collaborator rather than a substrate. What Kelly brings to that tradition is a compositional discipline that organizes the accumulated material into images that hold together as paintings, not just as assemblages.