Mike Kelley, “Timeless/Authorless” (installation view), 1995, a series of fifteen
black and white photographs mounted on museum board, 31 x 24 inches each.
As de Kooning said, “You make a painting about a crazy world, and they say it was made by a crazy artist.” This prescient statement applies to the work of Mike Kelley. When his collages of stuffed animals were interpreted as evidence of childhood abuse and repressed memory syndrome, Kelley took the ball and ran with it, going so far as to equate his memory of CalArts’ basement level with the imagined tunnels beneath the McMartin Preschool. In this selection of photo editions, Kelley ups the ante with a tour of the monuments of the Detroit neighborhood of his youth, transforming the ramshackle interior of an abandoned house into evidence of something more sinister. In another series, thirty-four cave formations are given names that evoke the real world--turning stalactites into a frozen waterfall. Kelly cautions us of our capacity to contrive things that aren’t really there.
Published courtesy of ArtScene.
