In the last two years, Toronto visual artist Jean-Paul Kelly has created a suite of videos that have honed his long-standing investigations of documentary imagery and its claims to truth. Using abstraction, animation and re-enactments, Kelly isolates the formal core of photojournalism and verité documentary to analyze the mediums' attractions and seductions — a practice that resonates with both visual arts discourse on the traumatic image and recent cinematic forays back into the roots of documentary form. This interdisciplinary nimbleness has drawn Kelly accolades from both the gallery and the cinema worlds, most recently the prestigious Kazuko Trust Award for "artistic excellence in the moving image" at the New York Film Festival last fall. This programme — which includes a brand new piece fresh from the artist's residency at the Delfina Foundation in London — speaks to the densely self-interrogating constellation of ideas that constitute Kelly's work, and suggests new ways of thinking through the logic of the documentary image.

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