Lot Essay
This work is accomapnied by a certificate with installation instructions, signed and dated by the artist M. Kelley 1990.
Since the 1980s the work of Mike Kelly has concentrated on themes of childhood and repression. The found stuffed toys and rugs he deploys evoke a psychology of childish games and playing. Abject and forlorn, they appear as regressive totems of affection and desire. But unlike the escapist or nostalgic logic of Art Brut's idealization of childhood, regression is not an end in itself. The artist does not seek to restore us to a prior innocence. Regression becomes instead a mode of social, cultural and aesthetic enquiry: "An adolescent is a dysfunctional adult, and art is a dysfunctional reality" (Kelly, quoted in Mike Kelly, London 1999, p. 58). Through a critical engagement with early trauma the possibility of reparation and therapy emerges.
Foreground, Background is also a celebration of the Vernacular. "I have a problem with the terms 'high' and 'low' - I prefer 'allowable' and 'repressed', as they refer to usage, whether or not power structure allows discussion" (Kelly, quoted in Mike Kelly, London 1999, p. 60). Assembling the anonymous, labor intensive products of craft is a direct confrontation with the orthodoxy's of the masculine high-art tradition, and prescribed modes of artistic production.
In Foreground, Background, Kelly's appropriated and recycled embroideries are props in an associative drama. The specter of childhood is recalled, and the viewer immersed in an aura of infancy.
Since the 1980s the work of Mike Kelly has concentrated on themes of childhood and repression. The found stuffed toys and rugs he deploys evoke a psychology of childish games and playing. Abject and forlorn, they appear as regressive totems of affection and desire. But unlike the escapist or nostalgic logic of Art Brut's idealization of childhood, regression is not an end in itself. The artist does not seek to restore us to a prior innocence. Regression becomes instead a mode of social, cultural and aesthetic enquiry: "An adolescent is a dysfunctional adult, and art is a dysfunctional reality" (Kelly, quoted in Mike Kelly, London 1999, p. 58). Through a critical engagement with early trauma the possibility of reparation and therapy emerges.
Foreground, Background is also a celebration of the Vernacular. "I have a problem with the terms 'high' and 'low' - I prefer 'allowable' and 'repressed', as they refer to usage, whether or not power structure allows discussion" (Kelly, quoted in Mike Kelly, London 1999, p. 60). Assembling the anonymous, labor intensive products of craft is a direct confrontation with the orthodoxy's of the masculine high-art tradition, and prescribed modes of artistic production.
In Foreground, Background, Kelly's appropriated and recycled embroideries are props in an associative drama. The specter of childhood is recalled, and the viewer immersed in an aura of infancy.