Documents two hours of my channel surfing habits on one particular night... a psychological snapshot or portrait of myself using the medium of television as a mirror.

Catalogue brochure excerpt for Remote Control exhibition, Forest City Gallery, London, 2002:

"Kelly Mark's Prime Time (2000) begins from a deceptively simple premise: a video recording two hours of channel surfing during prime time. By re-framing channel surfing as video, the work invests the clicker with the power of editing. It quickly becomes clear, however, that Mark's channel surfing starts out from a more deliberate premise than most: channels are scanned in serial order, from 2 to 104 and back again. The pacing is uneven: Xena the Warrior Princess and Ren and Stimpy garner more attention, for instance than Emeril's meringues. Inevitably the remote hurries you on to the next channel, continuing on its progress through the stations, continuing even into the outer reaches of the cable universe where we know nothing will be on. This conceptual rigour stuggles with the familiarity of the pacing, something that seduces yet manages to remain abstract and frustrating at the same time. Suspended in this mixture of the strange and the comfortable, I found myself forgetting that I wasn't the one clicking through the channels. Perhaps the kind of detached, semi-distracted control involved in channel surfing isn't the kind of thing that really needed much of a subject there anyways. My initial impression, that the artist had controlled the editing of the channels, faded. Here the artist's 'control' is at best a minimal manipulation of a series of ready-made images determined more by the field of mass culture than by the artist. Indeed, Mark's work seems less interested in a sociology of 'channel surfing,' than with extending her explorations of repetitions and series into the medium of television."
-Curator Craig Buckley

Exhibition History:
2000 Hamilton Artists Inc (Hamilton ON); 2000 Hamilton Art Gallery (Hamilton ON); 2000 Proposition Gallery (Belfast IRE); 2000 Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver BC); 2000 Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto ON); 2001 Plug In Gallery ICA (Winnipeg MB); 2002 Forest City Gallery (London ON);