On the occasion of the closing of the Mike Kelley exhibition Ghost and Spirit, the Bourse de Commerce is hosting an exceptional screening of his film Day is Done (2005-2006), which includes almost three hours of his performances.
In the mid-2000s, Mike Kelley continued his exploration of our collective subconscious by looking at the rituals of high school and college students. Using black and white photographs of various events found in yearbooks, he employed fiction to create what he called Extracurricular Activities Projective Reconstructions.
These are sound and image installations coupled with videos that seek to re-stage the initial images. The artist’s boundless imagination and his characteristic sense of satire reached their peak in this work. More than thirty of these installations were shown in New York in 2005 as part of the exhibition Day is Done, which lay halfway between musical theater and Gesamtkunstwerk. Kelley wanted to create one for each day of the year and to stage a continuous, twenty-four-hour operatic performance of them. When he took his own life in 2012, he had only completed 36 of them.
The film Day is Done features videos nos. 2-32 of Extracurricular Activities Projective Reconstructions.
Day is Done, 2005-2006 Colour video, sound, 169 min, Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI).
