Mike Kelley
1954-2012
West Coast artist Mike Kelley was one of the most provocative and influential figures in contemporary art. Kelley's idiosyncratic body of work includes performance art, installations, and sculptures. His works negotiate a highly charged terrain of desire, dread and sociopathology in everyday American life. With deadpan humor, he often reinvests childhood toys, kitsch, and ordinary objects with subversive meaning. For many years Kelley was involved in video projects as performer, collaborator, and maker. Among his collaborators are important figures in art, performance, film and video, including Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon, Ericka Beckman, Tony Oursler, Tony Conrad, Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto. As a performer, Kelley exhibits a psychodramatic intensity; his collaborative video projects inhabit a peculiarly American landscape infused with irony and pop cultural debris. Mike Kelley was born in 1954 in Detroit, Michigan and died in 2012. Kelley earned a B.F.A. from the University of Michigan and an M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts. In 2013, Kelley's work was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amster…
Films