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Tickets for Mike Kelley: Singles’ Mixer are free of charge and walk-ins are welcome (advance reservations are not required)

The Brant Foundation is pleased to announce the exhibition of Singles’ Mixer (2005/6) by artist Mike Kelley (b. Detroit, 1954–2012) in its East Village space. Opening May 17, 2024, this will mark the first presentation of the work in New York since 2018.

Among the most influential artists to emerge in postmodern aesthetics, Mike Kelley made irreverent artworks that blur disparate genres, media, and styles. Often inspired by popular forms and found objects, Kelley’s works incorporate mass culture and esoteric concepts in equal measure. Drawing humorously from these inspirations, Kelley attempted to deconstruct the dominant characters and motivations behind the American zeitgeist—seeking to “flay it, rip it apart, reconfigure it, expose it.”^[1]

Singles’ Mixer comprises a three-channel video piece foregrounded by an intentionally tacky installation with drab sculptural elements. In the video, an eclectic cast of characters engages in a conversation about their “dream men.” As the exchange unfolds, themes surrounding class, race, and sexuality gradually come to the fore. The characters (a computer nerd, a hillbilly, a witch, a Kiss fan, and four African American women) emerge more as caricatures than as developed individuals: archetypes meant to evoke the viewer’s preconceptions. The work is deliberately heavy-handed, as Kelley keenly employs satire to critique popular culture and reference broader societal interactions.

“We are thrilled to be exhibiting Mike Kelley’s thought-provoking work at The Brant Foundation this spring,” said the Foundation’s founder, Peter M. Brant. “With the proliferation of social media platforms, Kelley’s satire on human interaction remains as relevant today as when he first imagined Day Is Done in the early 2000s.”

Singles’ Mixer is one of 31 “reconstructions” that constitute Kelley’s ambitious and carnivalesque Day Is Done (2005/6), an operatic installation of American proportions. Day Is Done consists of vignettes, videos, and sculptures that depict narratives Kelley abstracted from a collection of high school yearbook photographs, gleaning action from after-school activities and characters from adolescent outcasts. Kelley’s live-action interpretations imbue the source material—imagery of extracurricular clubs, sports, dances, and more—with a psychological unease stemming from socially accepted rituals. The constellation of these farcical reenactments juxtaposes a lingering anxiety against activities ripe with youth and banality; Day Is Done in its entirety speaks to the cult of cultural and institutional rituals and their haunting effects from adolescence through adulthood.

Born in 1954 in Detroit, Michigan, Mike Kelley received his BA in 1976 from the University of Michigan and his MFA in 1978 from the California Institute of the Arts. Prior to his passing in 2012, Kelley had solo exhibitions at numerous institutions worldwide, including the Musée du Louvre, Paris; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Tate Liverpool; the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, among many others. A retrospective of his work was held at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 2012 and subsequently traveled to MoMA PS1, Long Island City (2013); the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2013); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2014).

^[1] Mike Kelley, interview by Art21, Art in the Twenty-First Century, season 3, episode 2, “Memory,” September 23, 2005, https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s3/mike-kelley-in-memory-segment/.