Brennan Gerard was born in Piqua, Ohio, in 1978, and Ryan Kelly was born in Drums, Pennsylvania, in 1979. Gerard received a BA in women’s and gender studies from Yale University, New Haven, in 2001, and Kelly received a BA in comparative literature from Fordham University, Bronx, New York, in 2008. Both artists completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (ISP) in 2010 and received MFAs from the Interdisciplinary Studio at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Art in 2013. Gerard & Kelly began collaborating in 2003 and employ multiple disciplines—performance, video, and installation—to examine questions of collective and individual memory, gender and sexuality, queer subjectivity, and the relationship between dance and visual art. One underlying goal of Gerard & Kelly’s work is to both subvert and propose alternative models to presenting identities, including those that challenge monogamous heterosexuality. In the related works Kiss Solo (2012) and Reusable Parts/Endless Love (2011), the duo re-creates Tino Sehgal’s work Kiss (2002), an eight-minute choreographed performance in which a man and a woman rapturously reenact a series of iconic kisses culled from throughout art history. Interpreting Sehgal’s work as a continuation of the art-historical tendency to privilege and reaffirm representations of heteronormativity, Gerard & Kelly sought to deconstruct this dominant ideology of romance. Kiss Solo is a multichannel video projected on four suspended screens, each showing a solo dancer performing both the male and female roles of an erotic encounter. Reusable Parts/Endless Love is a scored performance with a rotating cast, and each pair of male and female dancers enacts an intimate kiss that develops out of the pose and action of the preceding dancers. In both works, conventional gender roles as defined by amorous encounters—who is passive and who is submissive—are blurred, and private intimate moments open into collective public expressions. In Verb Dance (2014), the artists take Richard Serra’s iconic Verb List (1967–68)—a matter-of-fact list of actions that could be translated into sculptural processes—as a readymade choreographic score to explore the relationship between language and movement. The artists printed Serra’s verbs—to roll, to twist, to bounce—onto magnets that were arrayed across the floor and steel risers of the performance space. This arrangement created a linguistics-based system of stage blocking that shaped and directed the performers through simple expressive movements, metaphorically linking choreography and the act of making sculpture. Gerard & Kelly have had solo exhibitions at Kate Werble Gallery, New York (2013), and The Kitchen, New York (2014). Their work has been presented in a number of group exhibitions including Cult of the Ruin: Strategies of Accumulation, University Art Gallery, University of California, Irvine (2011); Anti-Establishment, Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2012); and Hammer Museum, UCLA, Hammer Biennial: Made in L.A. 2014 (2014). The artists have received numerous honors including grants and fellowships including the Van Lier Fellowship at the Whitney ISP (2010) and an Art Matters Foundation grant (2013). They were also artists-in-residence for the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s Fall 2014 R&D Season. The artists live and work in Los Angeles.