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September 26, 2025 – January 31, 2026

Kelly Mark
Everything and Nothing Between Us

Goldfarb Gallery Vitrines

The Goldfarb Gallery joins a city-wide celebration of the late artist Kelly Mark, who passed away earlier this year. Mark was known for her concise and acerbic wit, which she translated into a conceptually based art practice that upturned common perceptions of daily life through shifts in language, repetition, duration, and materiality.

Mark often used herself as a principal material. In her single channel video, 108 Leyton Ave, 2016, the artist faces herself in a split-screen projection, playing solitaire while conversing in a back-and-forth volley of clichés and aphorisms from “everything” to “nothing.” Each phrase prompts the next: “Everything bad that can happen will happen; Nothing is ever so bad that it can’t get worse.” Playing both roles, at times flirtatiously, she shifts between humour and reprimand, exposing the banality of language and the redundancy of conversation.

For the Gallery’s three vitrines, we have transcribed the dialogue from this video and her print EN Between Us, presenting Mark’s chain of aphorism across the glass façade of the windows. In this setting, Mark’s collection of sayings capture a melancholy that is not only a reflection of the artist, who in her final year’s became increasingly isolated, but also mirror the language loops of contemporary culture where social media reduces thoughts and experiences to fragments and catchphrases. As passers-by read, they will see themselves reflected in the glass around them, caught—like Mark—between “everything” and “nothing,” suspended at the reductive surface of stereotypes that when combined may offer a more complex glimpse at themselves.