Mike Kelley

Day is Done (Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions #2–32)

This epic new work by the seminal artist is a feature-length musical examining American subcultures through the restaging of carnivalesque productions intermixed into a meandering narrative. Each reconstruction is a live-action scene extrapolated from photographs found in high school yearbooks and investigates the pageantry around dress-up days, religious spectacles, fashion shows, singles’ mixers and musical follies. Described by The LA Weekly as “The Lawrence Welk show crossed with a Busby Berkeley musical,” Kelley disrupts traditional structures of such events to construct a dizzying daisy chain of performances. The result is a landscape populated by dancing Goths, singing vampires, hick storytellers, horse dancers and the Virgin Mary. Written and directed by Mike Kelley, with original music by Kelley and Scott Benzel, and choreography by Kate Foley.

Based in Los Angeles, Kelley works in video, sound, performance, installation, drawing, painting, and sculpture. Awarded the Wolfgang Hahn Prize in 2006 for his achievements, he has had solo exhibitions at The Tate Liverpool, The Whitney Museum, and The Louvre, and has taken part in group exhibitions including Life on Mars: 55th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 2008; and Petting Zoo, at Skulptur Projekte Münster, 2007. Kelley's work is in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Centre Pompidou, and the Guggenheim Museum, as well as many other museums and collections both in the US and internationally.

www.mikekelley.com

Satanic rituals and advertising jingles mingled with allusions to Godard, German Expressionist cinema and Stockhausen...toxic-comic carnival...an amazing feat of industry and poetics. Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times