April 20 - May 25, 2024

Patrick Painter Inc. proudly presents Mike Kelley’s new installation Black Out. The exhibition will open April 20th and continue through May 25th, 2002. A reception for the artist will be held Saturday, April 20th, 2002, from 6 to 8 p.m.

Black Out consists of a variety of elements, including a series of ‘documentary’ photographs, ‘manipulated’ photography, and a large-scale mosaic sculpture. The installation is an extension of Kelley’s ongoing fascination with the contemporary pop psychological theory of repressed memory syndrome that postulates that extremely traumatic episodes in a person’s life are repressed and forgotten. This trajectory began with Educational Complex (1995), an architectural model that combined and conflated every school that Kelley had attended.

Among the works included in the exhibition at Patrick Painter is the photographic series entitled Local Culture Pictorial Guide, 1968-1972 (Wayne/Westland Eagle), made up of 450 photographs culled from local Michigan newspapers at the time of Kelley’s discovery of fine art. The photographs, selected as historical representations of “local culture,” are grouped according to the artist’s associative systems, and mounted on double-sided 4 x 8’ vertical panels in two photo cabinets. Photo Show Portrays the Familiar is a portfolio of twenty-five photographs that mixes documentation of an exotic trip up and down the Detroit River with that of various cultural sites of Kelley’s youth, including the Henry Ford Museum and a public sculpture in a local mall. Also included is a fantasy documentation of the Land O’ Lakes Butter mythical Indian maiden (also pictured in the larger color photograph Butter-Colored Vision of the Land O' Lakes Girl, Peche Island).

Black Out (Detroit River) is a series of photographs documenting a boat trip up and down the Detroit River, shot in color. The photographs image the shoreline of the Detroit River. A technical malfunction produced images that are primarily black, with only a small strip of the film frame properly exposed. The technical error that produced these blacked-out zones became for Kelley a representation of the blocked- out trauma described in repressed memory literature. Similarly, during the production of the photograph Psychic Waveforms (Gerome Kamrowski’s Sculpture Garden, Ann Arbor, MI), an inexplicable error produced a visual anomaly resembling a chain-link wave pattern overlaid upon the image.

Kelley scavenged from the Detroit River, around a small island that contained the remains of a dumpsite from the 1920s and 30s, objects used to fabricate a large-scale mosaic sculpture John Glenn Memorial Detroit River Reclamation Project—a reproduction of the statue of John Glenn found in the library of his high school. Kelley’s recreation of this statue is twice the size of the original, and is grouped with several large color photographs: one depicts the original statue, and another one shows a chainsaw carving of the mythical Bigfoot from the Redwoods of Northern California.

Lingam and Yoni, a new series of eight sculptures, uses soil and detritus scavenged from various islands in the Detroit River, to form traditional Hindu fertility symbols. The size of Lingam is determined by the amount of soil in the collected sample. The size of the enveloping Yoni is determined by the amount of rock and solid substance collected.