Opening reception for the artist: Thursday, November 10th, 5 - 8pm
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by
Mike Kelley. "Day is Done" is Kelley's first New York exhibition since
2002.
"Day is Done" is a feature-length "musical" composed of thirty-two
separate video chapters. Each section is a live-action recreation of a
photograph of an "extracurricular activity" found in a high school
yearbook. Over the years Mike Kelley has collected hundreds of such
images and arranged them into rough categories. Most of the imagery is
immediately recognizable as standard forms of folk entertainment:
plays, follies, theme dress-up days, holiday festivities, religious
spectacles, hazing rituals, etc. Such activities serve as carnivalesque
disruptions of the normal school schedule, mirroring the function of
such events in the broader cultural arena. Many of them, such as
Halloween and Christmas-related activities, are secular outgrowths of
pagan ritual.
Unlike "Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A
Domestic Scene)," which is a thirty minute drama based on a single
photograph of a stage play, "Day is Done" is multipart with iconography
derived from the image files Kelley has labelled such as: religious
performances, thugs, dance numbers, hicks, and hillbillies, Halloween
and gothic style, satanic imagery, and equestrian events. The artist
chose to work with such a diverse set of images in order to force
himself to create a longer, more complex, video work somewhat akin to
traditional filmic narratives employing montage. Though not a
traditional narrative, "Day is Done" employs recurring characters,
intimations of simultaneous action, and some semblance of narrative
flow.
"Day is Done" will exist in several different forms. The one being
shown at Gagosian Gallery is a large-scale video installation
consisting of sets and projection screens. Various scenes will be
programmed to turn off and on prompting the viewer to follow the action
throughout the presentational space. Several scenes will run
simultaneously in order to promote the effect of filmic cross-cutting
in actual space.
Mike Kelley was born in Detroit, MI in 1954 and currently lives and
works in Los Angeles. He is a graduate of the California Institute of
the Arts and the University of Michigan. His solo exhibitions include:
The Tate Liverpool (2004), Museu D'art Contemporani, Barcelona (1997),
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Los Angeles County Museum
of Art (1993), and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. (1991).
A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany this exhibition. For more information, please contact the gallery.
