Mike Kelley and Michael Smith "A Voyage of Growth and Discovery"
SculptureCenter
This event has ended.
"A Voyage of Growth and Discovery" is a collaborative video installation by artists Mike Kelley and Michael Smith. The installation will include a six-channel video featuring Michael Smith's character Baby IKKI, a character that artist Michael Smith has been performing for over thirty years. Pre-lingual and of ambiguous age, Baby IKKI is both comedic and melancholy. The six-channel video follows the existential journey of the Baby over several days at a festival of "radical self-expression," famous for its presentations of large-scale displays of fire, held in the remote Black Rock Desert of Nevada. Michael Smith offers a masterful tragicomic performance that exhibits extreme physical endurance. The two-and-a-half hour multi-channel video, culled from hours of raw footage, is the result of an intensive and meticulous editing process between Mike Kelley and Michael Smith. The installation presented at SculptureCenter reflects the fantasy-oriented environment of the festival, which is both grand and folksy-an odd mixture of fairground, playground, hippie commune, and the futuristic architectural aesthetics of R. Buckminster Fuller. Resembling an abandoned festival site of the post-"new age" era, the structure circles a 30-foot tall junk sculpture representing Baby IKKI himself. Surrounded by video projection screens, the viewer is invited into this world of regression and tactile experience-to share in Baby IKKI's journey.
[Image: Mike Kelley and Michael Smith "A Voyage of Growth and Discovery" (2009) production still. Photo: Malcolm Stewart]
Media
Schedule
from September 13, 2009 to November 30, 2009
Opening Reception on 2009-09-13 from 17:00 to 19:00