A Domestic Scene is the first segment of Mike Kelley’s Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction series, a group of video works the artist created between 2000 and 2012, which were based on images of extracurricular activities from American high school yearbooks.
Styled as a play, the black-and-white video shows a confrontation between two men in a shabby apartment. Kelley thus explores psychological tensions and unspoken conflicts in familial relationships, including the deliberately clichéd staging and emoting, thereby emphasizing the artificiality of such narratives. The work scrutinizes how identity is shaped by cultural and social norms as well as by mechanisms of memory and repression. In this way and with biting humor, the artist probs questions of identity, psychological control, abuse and self-denial.
Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (Domestic Scene)
- Year 2000
- Edition Unlimited edition
- Material/Technique Single-channel video (b/w, sound)
- Length 29' 44''
- Category Media art
- Collection Sammlung Goetz, Medienkunst, München
Mike Kelley
271 pages, 150 ill., hardcover.
German/English
2008, Kunstverlag Ingvild Goetz GmbH, Hamburg
ISBN 978-3-939894-11-7
€ 25,00