Photos By Gail
A kitsch klatch of thrift shop yarn dolls and stuffed animals get the yearbook photo treatment alongside the genuine article (featuring the artist himself) in Mike Kelly’s lineup of misfit mug shots entitled Ah . . . Youth! (1991). The artist’s self-charicature compares his apathetic, acne-scarred, adolescent self to the cuddly but creepy castoffs in a fractured fairytale about youth.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Mike Kelley, Ah. . .Youth!
All Photos By Gail
In the exhibit The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin challenges the notion that the past is a fixed object, waiting to be elucidated. He calls the present “a waking world, a world to which that dream we name the past refers.” The dream quality of the past suggests that is is mutable, a patchwork of images and symbols that can be understood in myriad ways.”
The late artist Mike Kelley’s work has also focused on the unreliability of memory. His project, Mobile Homestead, a full-scale reproduction of his suburban, childhood home, resides on the grounds of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit. The building’s first floor maintains the floor plan of the original, but its multilevel basement, closed to the public, includes crawl spaces and rooms that can only be accessed through ceiling hatches.
The dreamlike, labyrinthine architecture suggests the slipperiness of the past. Kelley explores the denial of uncomfortable realities of abuse and oppression in domestic life, not in tune with the American Dream as represented by the suburban home, with its white picket fence. This lamp, a miniaturized version of the building, adds another layer of surrealness to the house.
Mobile Homestead Swag Lamp, Installation View
Photographed as part of the exhibit, The Arcades Project: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin, on Exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan Through August 6th, 2017.
The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #6: Fall, 1994 By Mike Kelley (All Photos By Gail)
Skarstedt’s Chelsea gallery is currently hosting an exhibition of Mike Kelley’s shaped paintings, never before seen as a group. Dating from the early to mid-1990s, this body of work demonstrates Kelley’s return to the medium following a 15-year span of performance, multimedia and installation art. Deconstructing the canon of modernist color and composition, the paintings manifest Kelley’s psychological road map through images recovered from his memory. Continue reading Mike Kelley, Shaped Paintings at Skarstedt Gallery
City of Kandor in a Bell Jar (All Photos By Gail)
According to the comic book legend, Superman’s father Jor-El sent his infant son to safety on Earth before Krypton’s destruction, saving his life but inadvertently sentencing Superman to a future of displacement, loneliness and longing.
Continue reading Pink Thing of The Day: Captured City of Kandor by Mike Kelley
All Photos By Gail
Hauser & Wirth is currently hosting the eponymous Mike Kelley exhibit, the gallery’s first exhibition devoted to one of the most ambitious and influential artists of our time. Organized in collaboration with the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, the exhibition is the first in New York to focus exclusively on one of the most significant of Kelley’s later series, Kandors. These visually opulent, technically ambitious sculptures combine with videos and a sprawling installation never before exhibited in the United States, as the late Los Angeles artist reworks the imagery and mythology of the popular American comic book hero, Superman, into an extraordinary opus of nurture and loss, destruction, mourning and – possibly – redemption. This my favorite exhibit of the year so far!
Continue reading Mike Kelley Brings His Superman Origin Story to Hauser & Wirth