Kelly Mark: Ghost Houses

An unexpected box arrives in the mail. Inside, a bubble-wrapped object is accompanied by a hand-drawn card. It’s a replica of a pint of Guinness, hand-lathed and faceted of dyed maple, with a crooked smiley-face engraved into the top by a rotary tool. A simulacrum of a glass of Irish stout with a bartender’s finger-drawn gesture in its foamy head. The accompanying card reads, “Yes, it is smoke-stained, but that proves the provenance…” 

This sculpture by Greg Forrest was traded with Kelly Mark at some point, later assessed by her estate, and was now being gifted to me.¹ She had passed away a few months before, and her death by MAID brought a flurry of press coverage and memorials across my social media feed. Posthumous exhibitions were organized in Toronto, and recently Glow House: Tribute To Kelly Mark re-launched Mark’s ongoing conceptual project—which occupies and illuminates residential homes with synchronized CRT television sets—in cities across Canada, to mark the first anniversary of her death.

I didn’t feel like the person most deserving to receive this Guinness, nor am I the most qualified to write this essay. I knew Kelly briefly, through various projects that I’ll detail in this text. Mark’s body of work has been extensively written about, with recent contributions appearing in Momus and in essays by writers Daniella Sanader, Dave Dyment, and Robin Metcalfe. Having recently returned to Kjipuktuk/Halifax after living in the U.S. for over a decade, I’m feeling the ghosts of my artist-past in parallel to Mark’s history. We were both strongly influenced by our time at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), then supported in early career by regional institutions and in later years by Diaz Contemporary. I’m not trying to make this about me, but rather I want to use these shared touchpoints as a conceptual limit to this essay’s scope.

NSCAD MAFIA

As a young person, I came to Mark’s work (and Kelly’s persona) through various channels. Taking “Intro Sculpture” with Forrest in the late ‘90s, I became familiar with her lore: she had been at NSCAD and involved in the founding of the Khyber (Club and artist-run centre) before leaving Halifax for Toronto in 1995. Of course, NSCAD’s contribution to conceptual art is well-documented, and systems thinking was still running deeply through the pedagogy of Gerald Ferguson and Garry Kennedy at that time.² They gave us instructions on instructions: students were encouraged to develop rule-based frameworks and follow them to absurd ends with dematerialized, distributable, and often labour-intensive works.³ These strategies are employed throughout Mark’s catalogue, and I’ll note the influence that artist-teachers Jan Peacock and Michael Fernandes also must have had on her. Mark’s intuitive, bodily take on performance and her use of video were adopted at NSCAD, and the interdisciplinary methodology that the school encouraged is present across her career trajectory.

Mark’s early successes were in Halifax. She credits early works like 1000 Hemlock Hits (1994), shot in the Khyber’s Turret Room, as “the beginning of the continuation” of what her work would become: idea, repetition, performance.⁴ In the video, two people bash lengths of 6’ x 6’ lumber at one another like jousting knights, and in the resulting sculpture, one battered tie is leaned against the other’s bruised end. “Kelly Mark Works,” curated by Ingrid Jenkner at MSVU Art Gallery in 1995, was Mark’s first major solo exhibition and acquisition into an institutional permanent collection. It included assisted readymades like Knife Collection—an example of her penchant for projects that are ongoing and obsessive (and additionally involve the minor theft of butter knives from restaurants and dinner parties).⁵ Other works in the show, Mended Stool and Split Axes, both employ manual labour in their materials and sculptural action, mending objects that had been broken in order to be repaired. 

The terms Neo-conceptualist or “working class conceptualist” have been used to discuss Mark’s oeuvre. A common joke about conceptual art is that you can describe the work and get most of the way to understanding it. One might recall David Hammons’ Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983), or consider the time it took On Kawara to send that vast volume of mail for Postcards: I Got Up (1968-79). Mark’s well-known negotiation for a minimum per-hour wage over the CARFAC solo rate (and the punchline that she would ultimately make more money from the former) is one such example of the idea itself circulating as the work. In both work and in life, Mark took advantage of what curator Helen Molesworth refers to as the “Duchampian rumour,” where the legend of an event travels as far (if not further) than the physical art object or person. However, Mark also knew that description was not always enough; some works demand durational attention in both their making and their reception. Obsessive fixation could be considered a medium of Mark’s, and as a viewer, dedicating one’s attention to it brings us into her world, where Everything is Interesting. 

Evidence points to Jenkner being the first curator to negotiate with Mark on the Minimum Wage deal, as part of bringing “Stupid Heaven” to MSVU in 2008.⁶ I encountered the show then, which drew from the previous decade of Mark’s output. I Really Should… (2002), a single-channel audio piece, compulsively lists 1000 things the artist ought to do, from the daily humdrum of getting a watch strap fixed, to overwhelming financial pressures of filing taxes or paying off student loans, poignant aspirations to keep in touch, and promises to eat better and quit smoking, all delivered in the same matter-of-fact tone. Listening to it, this terrifying spectre of to-dos produced a physical anxiety in my body and confirmed strategies of artmaking I was attracted to. 1 2 3 4 5 (2000), a black-on-white tally-mark-patterned wallpaper, alluded to a prison-cell-style of tracking the days.⁷ As a young artist feeling trapped in the relative isolation of Nova Scotia, I too was counting the days and yearning for some way to escape. 

The banal forcefulness of nothing happening in the video 33 Minute Stare (1996) felt defiantly boring, and boring art was not something that we NSCAD students were supposed to be making any more of!⁸ Mark employs her body or voice, but less as a capital-P “Performance Artist” and more as the readymade of a deadpan actor or set extra. I see her as standing in as (or for) the subject of the work. There’s not much emotion in 33 Minute Stare: “few character traits explicitly featured…no vulnerabilities are exposed, no confessions are made”.⁹ In the 2003 multi-channel installation titled HICCUP, Mark repeats the same choreography during her daily coffee break as a “ballet of the ordinary,” suffusing an artfulness into a ritual that is not encountered as art to someone just passing by. In Staff & Security (2003-ongoing), the artist wears the uniform of an embroidered hat and jacket, offering what Mark claimed was “a false sense of security.” When acting as Staff, she states: “I tend to show up late. I usually leave early… I have issues with authority…I drink on the job…But I’m always working.”¹⁰ In these performances, affect is shielded behind a cloak of invisibility: quotidian activities branded as an art practice, rendered with cool distance and a wry sense of humour. 

OVER DRINKS 

Forrest’s 30 Glasses of Guinness was, in part, inspired by NSCAD’s mingling of students, faculty, gallery folks, and visiting artists socializing over drinks. While drinking culture might be a well-trodden tourist trope that sells Nova Scotia’s colonial history of rumrunners, places like the Khyber (of which Kelly was a founding member) became the bar for a weirdo community, where emerging and established artists hung out together through the nineties and aughts. During that period, in Toronto, Kelly was also known for legendary gatherings at her place on Niagara Street, which I experienced only once. That night, she blasted Wayne Wonder’s hit song No Letting Go, and whenever I hear it, she enters my consciousness like a spirit from the other side. 

The late theorist Mark Fisher helped me understand Derrida’s hauntology as grief for a future promised but not delivered.¹¹ As workers themselves, the majority of artists are economically close to precarity yet subject to the billionaire class whose money shapes speculative real estate and the international art market. Kelly rightly predicted she might lose her downtown Toronto space to CONDOS(!) just as similar gentrifying pressures were being felt in Halifax (and which have only increased dramatically since then). In 2010, responding to the Khyber bar’s closure, arts-funding austerity measures, and artist-studio renovictions around town, curator Stefan Hancherow and I hosted a one-week exhibition and performance titled “The King & I” at Anna Leonowens Gallery. Part group exhibition, part fully operational happy hour, the simulated nightly bar was modeled after local dives, and tended to by Stefan and me. The walls showcased a “décor” of works by artists affiliated with NSCAD to create a DIY haunt, a space to goof off.¹² We featured Mark’s single-channel video Sniff (2002), in which Kelly’s cat Roonie is offered utensils, tools, and other bric-a-brac from around the house. Throughout the unedited 7-minute shot, the cat dutifully remains on their perch, sniffing nearly every item offered, including an open Corona beer. The cat refuses only a few things: money, a drain plug, a Zippo lighter, and Windex, and really goes for the Sweet ‘n Low artificial sweetener packet, an old book, and, in the closing scene, maybe gets a little bit high on a catnip plant. 

Smoking too recurs across Mark’s work, smuggling in her favoured themes of labour, vice, and everyday rituals. In the aforementioned HICCUP, and in Smoke Break (2004), Mark performs loitering. In the latter, taking the smoke break from the job IS the job, a 9-to-5 with union breaks and one-hour lunch. In her later video Smoke Buddies (2017), two unfurling smoke trails silently perform a mesmerizing dance in blue light and portrait ratio. And rather poignantly, Memento Mori (2017) is a bronze edition that depicts a used ashtray at 1:1 scale. This is another example of an artwork that might blend in as “not art” at a glance, stealthily placed in a collector’s home. 

EVERYTHING AND NOTHING

I was hired in 2013 to curate Halifax’s Nocturne Festival: a one-night, Nuit Blanche-type of exhibition. Among my ideas was to invite Kelly to show the Glow House, a work I had heard so much about. She replied:

“I’m kinda interested…
Glow House is not a possibility however (i’m not really into doing it again but more importantly availability of old CRT televisions is rare these days)
But lets talk on the phone, i might have another idea…
I’ll be up all night tonight if you wanna call or early in the morning before i head to bed”

I’m quoting this directly from her email to demonstrate her changing interests, the specificity of her tech requirements (CRT monitors), and her distinctive style: up all night and with limited availability. There’s a refusal to be totally amenable, but still a willingness to talk, offering a promise to be up for something else and using the opportunity to make something new.

In lieu of Glow House, Mark proposed a public spoken-word performance featuring two people reading a script back and forth. The script consisted of a collection of 200 phrases and idioms Kelly had been collecting, each alternating phrase leading with “everything” (spoken by a woman) and “nothing” (a man). Performed by Mark and artist Steve Higgins that October, Everything and Nothing would continue to be performed until 2019, later becoming the basis for 108 Leyton Ave (2014), in which Mark plays both mirrored parts, sitting across from herself at a table, with a drink and a smoke, the time on the clock suspended in the background.

Woman: everything a hero is not
Man: nothing a drink can’t fix
Woman: everything a woman needs
Man: nothing a man won’t do
Woman: everything bad happens for a reason
Man: nothing bad lasts forever

GHOST HOUSE

The original Glow House was shown in 2001 in Winnipeg, curated by the late Cliff Eyland and Les Newman, artists with deep ties to NSCAD and the early Khyber. Made with CRT television sets, it was synchronized by whatever was on TV to achieve a flashing, eerie effect. From outside, the house appears to be gutted, or haunted by the pulsating light. When it was eventually shown in Halifax in 2017, Mark still required those anachronistic CRT monitors, but according to some, she was largely absent from the labour of their procurement and installation, opting instead to be at the casino. The lugging and cabling shall be outsourced to young assistants! This was the kind of “Working Hard, Hardly Working” knife-edge she practiced.¹³ People often discuss her work as work, an expression of labour—and it is. She treated her studio as the factory, clocking in and clocking out, and used her time obsessively to repeat actions like counting grains of salt or rubbing graphite into wood or Letraset onto paper, or drawing until the pen ran out, and thus, her labour is often imbued into the physicality of the thing itself. But she also created avenues to avoid work at all costs: refusing the job, taking the smoke break, pointing toward an overlooked thing, watching too much TV, allowing the absurdity of life to guide the practice.

In 2026, I was asked to participate in the reboot of Glow House and convert my home into the artificially lit installation. Initially, I hesitated, worried that she wasn’t here to oversee it. To do it correctly requires one to source and lug those old monitors and hundreds of feet of coaxial cable. Even if I wanted to, the equipment is no longer easy to find, and analogue broadcasting is obsolete. This piece had begun from a simple observation and execution with materials easily at hand: ubiquitous TV light illuminating domestic spaces via mass-media broadcast could sync an experience across neighbourhoods or time zones and, therefore, could be employed to dramatically light a space. Today, the same effect could be reasonably achieved with any number of configurations of HDMI splitters, projectors, plasma screens, wifi, or even Zoom. Alongside artist Nathan Townes-Anderson and the tribute’s curatorial team, we workshopped using what we could easily acquire. To achieve the titular glow, we streamed CBC coverage of the Olympic Games for optimum flash. That had to be good enough. 

In Robin Metcalfe’s essay written for the occasion, he notes that he kept calling it Ghost House.¹⁴ On the first anniversary of her death, we joined others across the country to create our own ghost location. Was it her piece? Not exactly. It was a memorial gesture, improvised and emotionally accurate, though I don’t know whether Kelly would have liked it. Probably not. Nevertheless, on a cold, windy Saturday night in February, we welcomed visitors inside for drinks and stories. It was relayed that Mark had advised that the best things to broadcast to get the most dramatic flashing effect were Saturday morning cartoons—or pornography. Greg’s glass sat centre stage in the flickering glow of our living room, smiling away.

TICK-TOCK 

In Dave Dyment’s memorial piece written for CBC Arts, he describes a zeitgeist situation where he and Mark were simultaneously working on the same concept: an epic structuralist video of clock faces sourced from found footage, edited into a real-time 24-hour sequence.¹⁵ Rather than compete, they joined forces, only to concede the idea to Christian Marclay’s wildly famous The Clock. It’s a shame that Mark and Dyment’s 10,000 hours of unseen editing became effectively irrelevant just because Marclay, assisted by the literal White Cube and a team of assistants, got there first. Watching Mark’s TV mashup REM (2007) feels similar to experiencing the Hollywood-style cuts of The Clock. Quick edited snippets show men running up and down sets of stairs, through alleyways, in and out of doors, and around endless corners. It is a video labyrinth of movie-magic action: men doing fighting stuff, war stuff, Armageddon stuff. Always men, though. It’s Just One God Damn Thing After Another.¹⁶

Ideas float around like apparitions. The zeitgeist, a collective unconscious. Yet the art world (and capitalism) cling to the myth of the individual genius. Similar ideas arrive contemporaneously, but in a winner-takes-all market, some people are luckier, better resourced, or closer to power. After living in New York for the last ten years, I see more clearly how money and clout are disproportionately allocated to certain artists, while others remain nationally cherished and internationally obscure. I was in New York when Kelly died. The Americans I knew had not heard of her; in the Canadian art scene, there was an outpouring of recognition and grief.

In the era of AI, reels, and TikTok, I don’t want to take boredom for granted. In Mark’s work, we see her stubbornly make more boring art, and we can try to spend more boring time with it. Her embodied presence in her performances has a way of reminding the viewer that they are alive. As I dig through her work, I’m reminded of one reason I’m drawn to look closely at art: its ability to act as a time-travel machine, a portal to a person or time no longer available to us. I’ve honestly felt a bit haunted by Kelly. Maybe it’s the smiling Guinness glass, stained by her cigarette smoke, grinning at me now as I write this. I can’t help but wonder if this object contains traces of Smoke Buddies patinated into the surface. It’s become my Memento Mori. 

You Exist. You Exit. 

POST SCRIPT

Originating with a three-week presentation of Glow House at Deluge Contemporary Art (Victoria) curated by Kegan McFadden, Glow House: Tribute to Kelly Mark was presented by Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin (Lethbridge), University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon), One Night Stand (Winnipeg), Hamilton Artists Inc. (Hamilton), Goodwater Gallery (Toronto), Struts Gallery (Sackville), and residences in Montreal and Halifax. Text by Robin Metcalfe. Tribute was made possible by Anthony Cooper, Dave Dyment, Stefan Hancherow, Sanaa Humayun, Ivan Jurakic, Dean Baldwin Lew, jake moore, Su Ying Strang, Adam Whitford, Collin Zipp, and myself.

This essay would not exist without friend and collaborator Stefan Hancherow, who sent the card along with the Glass of Guinness, and invited me to participate in Glow House: Tribute to Kelly Mark. Thanks to Blair Fornwald for providing access to MSVU Art Gallery’s archival records and to Sarah Pereux at Olga Korper Gallery for providing images. Rumours corroborated by Greg Forrest, Melanie Colosimo, Peter Dykhuis, and by the essays and interviews credited, including Kelly Mark’s indexical website. Gratitude to my husband Nathan Townes-Anderson, who provided co-production of Glow House, documentation, photography, and editorial notes with care.

---

Kelly Mark (b. 1967, d. 2025) was a conceptual artist who lived and worked in Toronto. She was known for isolating moments of the everyday in ways that were unpretentious and unglamorous but full of warmth, ritual, and wit. Time, duration, measurement, and process are essential focal points in Mark’s multidisciplinary practice. Time’s governance of our reality, especially its undeniable grasp over working-class experiences, is a central concern in her oeuvre. Mark’s practice is embodied in a variety of media such as sculpture, video, installation, drawing, photography, sound, multiples, performance & public interventions.

Her work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Canada and abroad, including The National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Toronto), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), The Darling Foundry (Montréal), Musee d’Art Contemporain (Montréal); MSVU Art Gallery (Halifax), Bass Museum (Miami), University of Houston (Texas), Real Art Ways (Hartford), The Henry Art Gallery (Seattle), Ikon Gallery (UK), Dundee Contemporary Arts (Scotland), The Physics Room (NZ), Netwerk Centre for Contemporary Art (Belgium). Mark represented Canada at the Liverpool Biennale in 2006 and the Sydney Biennale in 1998. She was also a recipient of the K.M. Hunter Artist Award in 2002. Notable public collections include The National Gallery of Canada, The Canada Council Art Bank, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Global Affairs Canada. She is a graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

The Estate of Kelly Mark is represented by Olga Korper Gallery.

Eleanor King is an artist and educator whose interdisciplinary practice includes painting, video, sound, and sculptural installation. Often responsive and collaborative, her works are inspired by physical, social, and economic landscapes, frequently using language to reflect our rapidly changing world. Concerned with the impact capital has on our lands and politics, their work often focuses on the impact human-built infrastructure has on the environment. This research highlights justice issues we collectively face through a decolonial lens, and uses beauty and melody as methods to retain joy and hope.

Eleanor lives in Nova Scotia / Mi’kma’ki and New York / Lenapehoking. Her work has been shown in North America, UK and Europe, with notable installations at MoCA Toronto, Spring/Break Art Show (New York), Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (AGNS), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), and others. Eleanor has been artist-in-residence at A.I.R. Gallery, MacDowell, Yaddo, SOMA Mexico, The Banff Centre, and Glenfiddich; and supported through the Sobey Art Award, The Canada Council for the Arts, and Arts Nova Scotia. Her work has been featured in Canadian Art, C Magazine and Art in America, and is held in public and private collections.Notable public collections include Global Affairs Canada, The Confederation Centre Art Gallery, AGNS, and the Nova Scotia Art Bank. She is a Fulbright Fellow with a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA from State University of New York at Purchase College. 

1. Greg Forrest, 30 Glasses of Guinness, 1995. One pint made for each year of his life at the time, displayed on a Split Crow table, later distributed to individual collections.
2. Garry Neill Kennedy, The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1968-1978 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012).
3. Gerald Ferguson’s The Standard Corpus of Present Day English Language Usage Arranged by Word Length and Alphabetized Within Word Length (1970) and 1,000,000 Pennies (1979) come to mind.
4. Kelly Mark, interview by Liz Knox, 2006, https://kellymark.com/INFO_Interviews.html.
5. Kelly Mark, interview, The Rev Magazine, 2002, https://kellymark.com/INFO_Interviews.html.
6. Kelly Mark, Minimum Wage, 2008-ongoing. Contract in the MSVU Archives, dated January 2, 2008.
7. From the NSCAD wallpaper series, published by The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (2000).
8. See: John Baldessari, I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, 1971, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Lithography Workshop.
9. Dan Adler, “Kelly Mark Marks Time,” catalogue essay for Everything Is Interesting (Toronto: Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, 2014).
10. Kelly Mark, Staff, 2003–ongoing, public performance/intervention, embroidered nylon jacket and baseball cap, https://kellymark.com/IP_Staff_1.html.
11. Mark Fisher, “What Is Hauntology?,” Film Quarterly 66, no. 1 (2012): 16–24.
12. The King & I exhibition also included Greg Forrest, Glass of Guinness; Duke and Battersby, Being Fucked Up; David Askevold, Two Hanks; Michael Fernandes, Britney; and many others.
13. Kelly Mark, Working Hard, Hardly Working, 2009, neon, transformers, cobalt and clear glass with dimmer switch.
14. Robin Metcalfe, “Ghost in the Machine,” essay for Glow House: Tribute to Kelly Mark, 2026.
15. Dave Dyment, “Remembering Canadian Artist Kelly Mark, the ‘Working-Class Conceptualist,'” CBC Arts, March 25, 2025, https://www.cbc.ca/arts/remembering-canadian-artist-kelly-mark-the-working-class-conceptualist-1.7475062.
16. Daniella Sanader’s “Five Essays for Kelly Mark” (C Magazine, Issue 163, Spring 2026) similarly concludes a section with this quote—an allusion to Mark’s 2009 sculpture of the same name—albeit in a different context. I read Sanader’s essay after completing a draft of this piece, and have chosen to leave it in to demonstrate another example of the zeitgeist expressed above.

This article is published in issue 43.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue