Mike Kelley: Day is Done

UMMA inaugurates its New Media Gallery this fall with Mike Kelley’s “Day is Done,” which continues the artist’s career-long investigation into the relationships between order and transgression, popular and avant-garde culture, while touching on contemporary notions of trauma and repressed memory.

“Day is Done” comprises parts two through thirty-two of Kelley’s multifaceted and ongoing project “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions,” a body of work envisioned to eventually include 365 parts, one for each day of the year. Its thirty-one episodes are based on a series of photographs, culled from high-school yearbooks, depicting various “extracurricular activities,” specifically those that represent what Kelley has termed “socially accepted rituals of deviance”: dress-up days, religious performances, fashion shows, singles mixers, and talent shows, among others.