It’s hard to imagine the landscape of New York City performance art without the presence of John Kelly. On the scene since the early 80s, Kelly can seem a Romantic poet escaped into urban postmodernism. His countertenor voice is otherworldly. His sensibility is sensitive, haunting. Yet he is always precise, and extremely productive. In 2011, while working on a performance piece about the painter Caravaggio, Kelly fell from a trapeze to the floor. In the emergency room, he was not allowed to move until the doctors could ascertain the state of his neck and spine—it was a full 15 hours. Kelly later made The Escape Artist, a show about the flow of fears, hopes, and visions during those hours. Now, in his debut painting exhibition, Kelly presents a mixed-media installation of 180 panels that form a graphic memoir of the experience. It’s monumental in scale, but made up of minutiae. —Laura Jacobs