NEW YORK—Recent Yale grad Mary Reid Kelley struggles to be a “modern girl” in her stylized black-and-white videos on view at Fredericks & Freiser through Oct. 3. The exhibition consists of two wall-sized projections, of Kelley’s Sadie, the Saddest Sadist and The Queen’s English. Acting as all of the characters in both works, which combine live action and stop-motion animation, the artist squarely addresses the viewer with cartoonish patches over her eyes, speaking in pun-laden, sometimes rhyming, broken speech.

In the gallery's front room, Sadie, the Saddest Sadist opens in a domestic setting, with the video’s protagonist stacking cubes of sugar. The table is set for tea, with each white prop outlined in black, looking like a still-life version of a Jean Dubuffet sculpture. Behind Sadie is a “window” showing a film noir-inspired silhouette of an industrialized city.

The narration soon reveals the era to be World War I, with Sadie a British woman who decides to leave her domestic life and join the workforce. She finds work at an ammunition factory and becomes impassioned about the war, as many British suffragettes did at the time. The video then slips into stop-motion animation of white text moving over a black background, revealing a derogatory instruction Sadie’s factory foreman gives her: “Take a good grip on the means of production, relax, and let your form follow its function.”

Sadie recounts his statement with a matter-of-fact tone and an expressionless face — a passiveness that is also reflected in her body language. Although she is not physically constrained in any way, she is shown from the waist up, speaking with no gesticulations and very little torso movement. With her blackened eyes, white painted face, and slight bobbing of her head as she speaks, she looks like a human marionette. She has achieved a place in the workplace, but no power.

Her interaction with Jack, a sailor she meets on the street, also puts her in a compromised position. Wordplay in the dialogue implies a sexual encounter between the two, and the next day Sadie collapses after coming down with a sexually transmitted disease that appears as black spots up and down her arms. She continues to tell her story from the floor, reminiscing about her quest to be a “modern girl.” Her dialogue is bittersweet as she addresses directly and sadly how her power as a woman is connected to her sexuality. We are reminded of how the egalitarian feminism in Britain’s prewar years led to women entering the workforce as they filled in for the men who were away at battle, only to shift back to their domestic roles when the war ended.

At the end of the video, the camera zooms in on Sadie’s mouth; with the artist’s lips and teeth covered in black, her mouth becomes a gaping hole that overtakes the screen. The imagery brings to mind Lucio Fontana’s stash paintings, Georgia O’Keeffe’s luminous vaginal abstractions, and the brazenness of Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World. Although Sadie has been incapacitated by the war and the sailor, she leaves the screen with an overpowering image of female sexuality and the quip “I gave you my applause, and you gave me the clap.”

The Queen’s English, shown in the gallery’s slightly smaller second room, also deals with how the women’s movement was sidelined by the onset of modernism and the First World War. The video chronicles the death of a soldier, as observed by a nurse, another common occupation for women during the war years. While Sadie employs many visual allusions to fragmentation through its modern, almost Cubist look, The Queen’s English uses its own form of fragmentation with its imagery of severed hands dancing around the screen. There's also the occupation of an army nurse, who would have seen not only amputations but many other ways in which a body can be torn apart. The videos' theme of a fragmented worldview draws attention to the choice of a World War I setting, a time when ideas about modernism and industrialization would shift dramatically.