MANUAL ARTS is excited to present an exhibition of 16 photographs from Mike Kelley’s Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction series (2000–11).
Mike Kelley’s (1954–2012) hallucinatory works repeatedly examined the rituals, traumas, and tensions of everyday life. With his seminal 1995 sculpture Educational Complex, he created an architectural model of every educational institution he attended from memory, leaving the gaps in his recollections blank in the model. To continue mining this haunted, col- lective past, Kelley aspired to create 365 Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions (EAPRs )—a sprawling group of 365 videos or video installations—one per each day of the year. He completed 36.
Kelley, an avid collector of found material, selected images from his stockpile of found yearbook photos of carnivalesque extracurricular activities to use as a starting point for each EAPR. With no additional context other than the source image, he then re-imagined the narratives, re-staging them and recording videos which were installed alongside related sculptures and photographic diptychs. Each diptych pairs an image appropriated from a yearbook with a haunted reenactment, creating duplicate performances that compete, like conflicting testimonies, over an unknowable truth. Despite the somewhat aberrant nature of the selected scenes, all of the activities depicted are endorsed by the institution. “You just know that it’s this kind of free moment in an authoritarian system,” Kelley wrote, “a moment that transgresses the boundaries but that’s completely allowed, even sanctioned by the system.”
The works on view are selected from EAPRs #2–#32, which debuted as a group at the Gagosian Gallery in 2005 under the overarching title Day Is Done. They can be easy to overlook within complete EAPR installations—overwhelmingly elaborate and immersive mixed media sites designed to disrupt attention. This exhibition isolates the photographic element of Day Is Done, giving viewers a rare, uninterrupted look at the germ of the world that Kelley built out into three dimensions.
This project was assembled in collaboration with the Mike Kelley Foundation For The Arts. We are grateful to Hauser & Wirth for their support.
