My House curator, Tobin Gibson, introduces this special event — only the third time Mike Kelley's "fractured feature-length musical" has been screened in a cinema. Extending the artist's subversive, multifaceted examination of trauma, abuse and repressed memories, refracted through the prism of personal and mass-cultural experience, Day Is Done is composed of live-action recreations of high-school yearbook photographs of extracurricular activities, or, as the late artist himself termed them, "socially accepted rituals of deviance." These carnivalesque disruptions of the normal school schedule, in the form of pageants, recitals, variety shows, hazings, slave auctions and dress-up days, mirror events in the broader cultural arena.
Day Is Done | USA 2005. Dir: Mike Kelley. 169 min. Video.
Tobin Gibson lives in London, UK, and has previously worked with Presentation House Gallery, The Apartment, and, more recently, with Maureen Paley in London. He is currently working towards two thematic exhibitions for 2017: the first linking somatic, temporal and material gestures within abstraction and minimalism; the second focused around humanity's sixth mass extinction.
Presented in conjunction with the exhibition My House: Mike Kelley & Ryan Trecartin at Presentation House Gallery, December 19, 2015 – March 6, 2016.
With special thanks to the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.
Please note earlier than usual start time.