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Kelly Studio
An installation by Johanna Leech and Stuart Calvin
Studio 2, featuring a selection of appearances on the Kelly Show.
The chat and variety show Kelly (1989—2005) provided a meeting place for the neon of host Gerry Kelly’s distinctive signature and glitzy studio decoration and the cathode-ray tubes in our late-twentieth-century box-monitor television sets that transmitted the entertainment; both, to put it simply, are tube-shaped systems that produce coloured light powered by a box of electronics. Preserved by Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive—itself providing an alternative way of restoring the neons as well as the programme—screened in Studio 2 are excerpts from live recordings of Kelly. The low-resolution digitised videos become ghostly shadows of what once happened in this space replaying time and again for you, a live and not live audience. Imagine yourself going back in time and soaking up the atmosphere of a myriad of performances against the glamorous backdrop of the bright neons accentuating the set. Media history was made in these rooms, and now you are part of it, too
Text adapted from the essay Welcome to Havelock House by P.E.A. Blair
This installation was inspired by the lighting design of the early Kelly Shows. Watch the selection of Kelly shown on a box monitor during the exhibition.