Jean-Paul Kelly (b. 1977, London, Ontario, Canada) is an artist based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He produces video, photo-based work, and drawings that are often constructed using a hybrid vernacular of cinematic reference, home movies, cartoons, digital compositing, and performance.  His work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals in North America, Japan, and Europe, most recently as part of art-action: rencontres internationales 2006 in Paris, Berlin, and Madrid.  Gallery TPW (Toronto) will present a solo exhibition of Kelly's work in the fall of 2008.  He received an Ontario Arts Council Media Arts Grant for emerging artists in 2006.  Kelly is member of the Pleasure Dome experimental film and video programming collective, and curated "Drawn In From Without" as part of Vtape's Curatorial Incubator project in 2007.  Kelly holds a Masters of Visual Studies degree from the University of Toronto (2005), where he is currently an instructor.

Kelly's work engages “with the social, political world (the documentary world) through the strangely slippery, almost liminal category of the everyday.” – Steve Reinke, “The New Everyday (The Day Before Tomorrow)”

“Grounded in self-reflection and readings from psychology and film theory, [his work] addresses issues of self-doubt and personal anxiety, seeking to understand and work through a profound sense of “anticipatory melancholia”… Anticipatory melancholy borrows from the phrase “anticipatory grief” … The loss has not yet happened but is inevitable, and all the more devastating for being imminent yet in the future.  For Kelly, the term also refers to his everyday anxieties about aging parents, love relationships, and his own eventual demise. But [his work] is also… witty and amusing work of great charm and self-deprecating humour, conjuring wicked pleasure and irony at the very edge of the abyss.” – Peggy Gale, writing on Kelly’s The Lie in Wait (2006) in the University of Toronto MVS Programme Inaugural Graduating Exhibition catalogue.