Mary Reid Kelley, The Queen’s English, 2008, still from a black-and-white video, 4 minutes 20 seconds.

AS AMERICA’S MISADVENTURES in Iraq and Afghanistan continue, with Iran boiling on the horizon, war fills our minds. A growing number of artworks and films focus on our current crises, but what makes Mary Reid Kelley’s videos particularly fascinating is that they send us backward in time to the grimly instructive universe of World War I. The Great War hovers above all narratives of armed conflict in modern memory, with its shattering speed of destruction, its multiple fronts blistering and spreading, the world order collapsing in its path. Broken unities gave way to the iconoclasms of a new culture’s anomie and social upheaval. That is the background against which Kelley unfolds her recent works, Sadie, the Saddest Sadist, 2009, and The Queen’s English, 2008, which fuse performance, poetry, and painting and focus on two women in the war effort, caught up as subalterns in the labors of industry, death, and sex.

The works had their premiere this past September in Kelley’s first solo exhibition in New York (at Fredericks & Freiser), but her fascination with war long precedes them. Three years after graduating from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, she was invited to take part in a 2004 group show on the school’s campus, where she presented photographs of two small scenes with paper figures, one staging the famous hoisting of the flag at Iwo Jima and the other a woman mourning her son’s death in World War II. This second image was of special significance to Kelley’s art: The news of the loss came in the form of a letter, a traditional narrative form that tied directly to her burgeoning interest in “the continual shaping of historical war narrative at all points in culture,” as she puts it. The language of loss and the loss of meaning in language—both playful and mournful, deployed publicly and privately—became her subjects. When she returned to school in 2007 to get an MFA in painting at Yale, she found herself drawn to the university’s memorial to alumni killed in the Great War, with its cenotaph and battle names carved into the entablature of its Corinthian colonnade. She began to research the men memorialized there, traveling to Europe after her first year to visit their graves and poring over the popular songs and poetry of the time.

What she saw in these poems—the work of Wilfred Owen, for example, who famously wrote, “Red lips are not so red / As the stained stones kissed by the English dead”—was a narrative structure whose rules of rhyme and repetition created a self-enclosed logic that intensified expression—a “saturation,” as Kelley calls it, that she wanted for her own work. She admired contemporary women artists who were wielding language politically, too, Adrian Piper and Jenny Holzer among them. And when she saw Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries’ text animations during that first year at Yale, she says, “I started to realize that to make my text time-based was a structural way of increasing saturation.” She brought these interests to bear in The Queen’s English, which fixes on the character of a nurse at a dying soldier’s side who can’t confront what she sees and resorts to the deflections of euphemism. This loss of directness of meaning mirrors a body drained of vitality in the face of death. The King’s English—as it would have been at the time—and the King’s service merge, testing all those who labor under his rule, language and life ruthlessly entwined.

Kelley saw the nurse as the carrier of a figurative breakdown, her euphemistic speech an infection within language, and when she turned to her next project, Sadie, she thought about actual infection and another linguistic tool to redirect meaning, the pun. Inspired by Angela Woollacott’s On Her Their Lives Depend (1994), a book about female English munitions workers during the Great War, Kelley here tells the story of Sadie and her exploitative swain, Jack, a sailor on leave, who take up the disruptions of war and social order in a narrative of infatuation and infection: a brief sexual encounter that climaxes in Sadie’s contraction of, she bluntly states, “the clap.” Every moment in Sadie, which runs just over seven swift, densely packed minutes, is infused with Kelley’s ludic pyrotechnics of pun and rhyme, both visual and literary. Her characters (she plays both factory worker and sailor) are live cartoon figures in a cartoon world. With a nod to George Herriman, the great early-twentieth-century cartoonist who brought us Krazy Kat, everything we see is painted black-and-white like stick figures in a landscape: a room; a cup of tea, a spoon, and sugar cubes; even Sadie and Jack, whose eyes are vertical black ovoids against parched white skin.

The mash-up that is Kelley’s three-dimensional world dressed up as two is a pun for the eye that parallels what the ear hears as her characters recite a poem whose racing engine of rhymes recalls the doggerel lyrics of English music halls, lubricated by the sheer fluidity of her words’ meanings. So, for example, when she discovers that Jack has infected her, Sadie cries out: