The artist Kelly Mark, prolific and beloved, left us on February 21, 2025. In spending time with her art these past weeks, I have found that there are so many possible entrances in her work for talking about her exit. To begin with, there is the literal EXIT sign morphed into a koanlike EXIST (2009) that has us confronting the “is-ness of existence,” as the curator Robin Metcalf put it. There is the tally mark—four vertical lines crossed by a horizontal line—that Mark adopted as her logo (also a play on her name) and even made into wallpaper (12345 Wallpaper, 1999/2000). Every year on her birthday she would add another hash-mark tattoo to her body, like a prisoner’s count. With I Really Should . . . (2002), an audio recording, Mark’s voice is heard listing all the things desired and unlikely; incredibly, in 2010 that work was overdubbed on a Dutch techno track called “I Really,” which even made a list of top-ten songs in Europe that summer. I love to think of her voice ringing out in eternity over some darkly glittered dance floor, reckoning with her lives not lived. Then there is her masterpiece, 108 Leyton Ave (2014), a video work in which the artist has an eternal conversation with herself over a table set with a desk clock, cards for playing solitaire, endless cigarettes running down to the butt, and some bourbon. All that’s missing is a skull.
But I see Mark’s ending, now, as most poignantly contained within In & Out (begun in 1997). On a vintage punch clock, she punched in and out of her studio every day, in eight-hour shifts. The amassed yellow timecards would line the walls of her studio—or exhibitions—like so many organized receipts for the work. When she began it, she scheduled the work to end in 2032, the year she would have reached the retirement age of sixty-five. During her last week, Mark had punch cards for the past five years sent to her gallerist and the work’s collector, Paul Marks, completing In & Out. “As a representation of her lack of studio time during those years, the last five years of cards are blank,” her friend Anthony Cooper told me. “The punch clock, however, did continue to click and ding until her last day.”
The through line across these works is Mark’s focus on the endurance and labor of being an artist. This will remain central to her legacy, but so will her impact on a generation of artists and their understanding of what it means to survive. Born in Welland, Ontario, Mark attended the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design at a critical moment in neo-conceptualism’s rise, and found herself both contributing to its vernacular and refining its forms but also undermining its self-seriousness; she called herself a “working-class conceptualist” for the length of her career. She made her home in Toronto and made an artist’s life as the city became a less and less hospitable place for artists to live. She described her survival as a rotation: “I tend to show up late. I usually leave early. I take long breaks. I have issues with authority. I don’t follow instructions. I don’t work well with others. I drink on the job. I complain a lot. But I’m always working.”
Famously loving and notoriously cranky, Kelly was an advisor to many on what it means to maintain a practice. Some of our first meetings together, when I was brought on as a copy editor for her twenty-year monograph Everything Is Interesting (Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, University of Toronto Art Centre, 2014), were about how to get paid. I will be forever indebted to her for those conversations. She took this work seriously and understood intrinsically that it required other people. In the remembrances collected here—from her closest friends, collaborators, and supporters—I see the length of her reach and the perhaps always planned-for foreverness of her hard-won work.
—Sky Goodden
Kelly Mark, In & Out, 1997-2025. Collection Paul Marks. Courtesy the Estate of Kelly Mark.
Micah Lexier
I first met Kelly in early 1997 when Christina Ritchie and I drove out to Dundas, Ontario, to do a studio visit with her. One of the artworks she presented was Object Carried for One Year, which was a small bar of engraved aluminum that she was carrying around in her pocket. When she pulled it out to show us (the year was not up so it was still an active artwork), I fell instantly in love with it. Right there and then I offered to buy it. She happily agreed (it turns out it was to be the first work she ever sold), and she said she would be in touch when the year was up. Sure enough, I heard from her months later, and we met up to complete our transaction. When it came time to discuss the price, she said it was $1,200 (the most I had ever paid for an artwork to date), with the logic being that she was charging me $100 per month (a very Kelly-like logic). I consider Object Carried for One Year to be one of Kelly’s masterpieces. Not only does it document one year of Kelly’s life, but it also documents the beginning of our relationship. Kelly and I would go on to collaborate, to curate each other, and to be Friends.
Kelly Mark, Object Carried for One Year, 1996-7. Courtesy the Estate of Kelly Mark.
Christina Ritchie
Not unlike many artists, Kelly reached middle age with a plan to revisit earlier works, reworking them in a “where is she now?” sort of project. Her landmark work, I Really Should . . . [2002], whose first iteration was written with black marker on her refrigerator door, was reconceived as I Wish I Could [iterative, no date], a mordant recasting of her youthful smirk at aspirational culture. She worked on it sporadically over the last few years and finally abandoned it some months ago because she “just couldn’t find the humor in it anymore.”
A lifetime of shift work, fast food, smoke breaks, minimum wage, couch-potato channel-surfing—all devices she used to poke fun at our social absurdities—had morphed into Just One Goddamn Thing After Another. Despite the rigors of her failing health, her sense of humor never failed.
Anthony Cooper
I got to know Kelly while working for Diaz Contemporary in 2008. She lived across the street at the Coffin Factory, and because she was living in an only semilegal apartment, she would get packages sent to Diaz. When she would come across the street to pick things up, she’d come to the door, and upon entering, light a cigarette (unlike others who would typically put out a cigarette when they arrived somewhere). Ben [Diaz] would coyly come over, bum a smoke, and they’d share a few minutes of conversation in the gallery.
I got much more involved in her life when she needed some help at the Scarborough house that she had moved to. I became her studio assistant, helped her renovate her house, and helped with a few projects, including 108 Leyton Ave. We stayed friends as she moved back to the city to her final apartment at 40 Raglan.
She was a very sweet and thoughtful friend, one who was especially great for art chats. She loved having impromptu studio visits while hanging out, over cards or dice. She loved hearing about the new happenings in the city, about any new galleries, and what was going on with young artists. When you would get going with her, you’d sort of end up working through ideas together. I think this is an experience shared by her many friends and colleagues. It was an experience shared.
Kelly Mark, Smoke Buddies (Two Views), 2017. Courtesy the Estate of Kelly Mark.
Dell Pohlman and Lauren Raymore Pohlman
We first met Kelly in 2009 in Grande Prairie, Alberta, where she was installing her Glow House [2005]. She toured us through and gave us a behind-the-scenes peek, and we were enthralled. A few months later we purchased her iconic work The Kiss [2007] from the same Glow series. It was the first of many pieces we would acquire from Kelly.
Kelly’s pieces are a major part of our collection because her conceptual practice and the humor that she incorporated into them resonate with us. (For instance, she liked the funny idea of putting her light piece Working Class My Ass [2017] outside over our front door. Friends talked us out of that! So it now lives outside over the back door instead, as a less offensive statement.) We recently loaned two videos—A Man & A Woman [2007] as well as 108 Leyton Ave—to the Art Gallery of Alberta, and Kelly was very pleased to hear that these were being seen.
Living in Calgary, we did not get to see Kelly as often as we would have liked, but we did attend this year’s Super Bowl party with her, hosted by Micah Lexier and Guy Anderson. And we would phone each other frequently; we always loved how Kelly would answer the phone with, “Hey, Babe.”
Kelly was certainly one of a kind and we will miss her.
Kelly Mark, Glow House #3, 2005. Courtesy the Estate of Kelly Mark.
Dean Baldwin Lew
Kelly Mark had big dick energy. She was a total cunt. I loved her.
I don’t recall our introduction, typical social life of the early naughts. Standing around a cheese plate on a folding table, five mins here, ten there, before you know it, four days a week, twelve hours at a time. She loathed leaving the house, calling me at times to say things like, “This museum wants me to go perform a piece, in fucking Luxembourg. They’re sending you a plane ticket.” Her studio door was always ajar, tempting us visitors. We’d knock unannounced, then natter away the night, scheming plans, playing poker, and chain-smoking, departing as the sun rose.
Kelly was a master of minutiae. She was ever-dissecting work patterns, isolating fragments, and process into component parts for examination, where actions in repetition help dissolve our illusions.
Refusing an artist fee in lieu of minimum wage, she gives us a lens to observe our unpaid labor. The drywaller earns more. I began conversations about potential projects with, “What’s your catering budget?” (it’s always higher than artist fees). These institutional critiques aimed at assumed patterns were a delight to unbalance in cahoots. I take joy in playing bartender to patrons who treat me as one and Kelly’s “STAFF” jacket is emblematic of this cloak-and-dagger where we hide in plain sight to gain entry. As artists our unique power can be a chameleonic approach to social class.
On her fortieth birthday she invited forty people to gift her a bottle of whiskey and she immediately displayed them on shelves in the studio with each person’s name written beneath. Everyone saw how much everyone else had spent AND the order in which they arrived at the party. It was a lesson in class transparency, and some reflexive hospitality to have the focal point of the party looking back on us the whole night.
Kelly, I am angry at you for not letting me in on the plan. Angrier at myself, far away, for not knowing. I’ll carry on your light, flickering off this Zippo you left me . . . sleep well, friend.
Kelly Mark, Hello and Goodbye, 2018. Courtesy the Estate of Kelly Mark.
Kelly Mark, I Called Shotgun Infinity When I Was Twelve, 2006. Courtesy the Estate of Kelly Mark.
Paulette Phillips
Kelly honed the magnetic artist personae of cranky androgynous factory worker. The factory she worked at day and night was her studio. She made labor-intensive art. The work was often repetitive and mind-numbing and the result insightful, timely, and funny. Her materials, humble, inexpensive, quotidian, she elevated into art. As a factory worker, Kelly maintained unorthodox hours; she would work for days on end without sleep and then she would sleep until she woke and do it all again. Her studio on Niagara Street did not have much natural light so sunrise and sunset were not regulating factors in Kelly’s life.
Kelly loved to throw parties. For a time, Kelly was the epicenter of a vibrant art scene in Toronto. Kelly was a center of attention, an uncompromising Leo with strong opinions. In 2009, Kelly and a number or artists joined Dean Baldwin in Reverse Pedagogy at the Venice Biennale. Kelly found the one McDonalds restaurant in Venice and ate her meals there. She didn’t much care for Venice.
Kelly and I had a deep bond; we were as different as chalk and cheese, but we loved each other deeply. I sometimes drove Kelly around and no matter who was in the car Kelly always called shotgun.
Kelly was a barometer when the art world started to shift (see her work 108 Leyton Ave). Kelly lost ground, literally. She was reno-victed out of her beloved Niagara Street studio and the loss of urban studio space made being a factory worker difficult and isolating. Kelly was funny, sharp, tenderhearted, and romantic and left behind a hugely influential body of work. I could write a book about Kelly. She is a legend and I will always miss her.
Kelly Mark, 108 Leyton Ave., 2014. Courtesy the Estate of Kelly Mark.
Dave Dyment
Sure, Kelly Mark could be difficult and prickly (and not noting this would feel like hagiography), but she did everything on her own terms and, in many ways, this is to her credit. I’m thinking about all the brilliant projects she made (across a wide variety of media), and I’m thinking that I was better for having known her and lesser for having lost her. And I’m hoping an institution gives her the big-budget retrospective that she is due.
Roula Partheniou
Kelly was the first example—someone in my actual life—of an artist whose art and life were indistinguishable. It came so naturally to her to organize her hours, days, years in terms that were relatable, funny, mundane, and poignant all at once. She framed it all as a “shitty day job, that does have its perks.” Taken as a whole, her life as practice was her final masterpiece.
Kelly Mark, No Tofu/No Yoga Mat (Zippo), 2009. Courtesy the Estate of Kelly Mark.
Paul E. Bain
Kelly Mark was a working artist. Literally, and infamously, she punched a clock going to work every day for twenty-seven years, until one day she stopped. Unlike most artists (a sad comment on supports for artists in this country), she didn’t teach or work other jobs.
She made art.
In this shambolic world, Kelly kept things simple. She kept off social media, and although she had great parties when people did that sort of thing, she was, to be frank, antisocial. Most people genuinely pissed her off. As a lawyer, and as her lawyer, I enjoyed her wordplay. Pithy. Some say I’m dry, but Kelly’s humor was Saharan. It is impossible to talk about Kelly’s oeuvre without noting her love of FUCK, as in FUCK IT, FUCK OFF. Or her use of ellipses, as in her signature I Really Should . . ., a recurring theme, a combination of to-do list and regret.
Assisting her with legal matters, like a copyright case involving another neon work, we were coconspirators:
Writing to the infringers (a local restaurant), I took a Markian, wry approach she appreciated: “Anyone with even a passing acquaintance of our laws (such as a 12-year-old child) knows that it is wrong to copy the work of another. You should know that an original work of art entitles its creator to certain protections, unlike something more ordinary, like a recipe for kale salad or chicken and waffles, admittedly a tasty combination.”
Her plan to exit life came as a shock and yet was so Kelly. She was steadfast and brave. I’m not “Kelly Fucking Mark anymore” is what she said a week before the end. Meaning: she could no longer make art. She had few family connections but did have a faithful group of art friends who were there when she needed: Anthony Cooper, Christina Ritchie, and Sandra Rechico. Angels all.
When I asked what I could bring to her farewell party (at Olga Korper’s), anything at all, let your imagination run wild, I was told a pack of smokes. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, and so I joined Toronto’s most famous art-world chain-smokers, Olga and Kelly, who chortled in delight as I coughed my way through each drag. A few days after her exit, I found this lighter designed by Kelly—No Tofu/ No Yoga—while cleaning out a drawer at home and laughed some more.
Kelly Mark was a working artist and out of FUCKS to give.
