Mike Kelley

Kelley was born in Wayne, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit in 1954. He was brought up with the city's music scene which spawned such bands as Iggy and the Stooges, and was a member of Destroy All Monsters. In 1976 Kelley graduated from the University of Michigan.
He moved to Los Angeles in 1978 and attended the California Institute of the Arts, where he said he admired the work from some of his teachers, including John Baldessari, Laurie Anderson, David Askevold and Douglas Huebler. At that time he started to work on a series of projects in which he explored quite a loose or poetic theme, such as The Sublime, Monkey Island and Plato's cave, Lincoln's Profile, using a variety of different media such as drawing, painting, sculpture, performance and writing. Kelley started to gain recognition outside Los Angeles in the mid-eighties with the sculptural objects and installations from the series Half-a-Man and have since then exhibited in galleries and museums in other countries^{[citation needed]} and participated in art events such as Documenta 9. Sonic Youth featured his work on the cover and booklet of their 1992 record Dirty. There was a retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum in New York City in 1993. He has been showing with Metro Pictures, New York since 1982.
In November 2005, Kelley staged Day is Done, filling Gagosian Gallery with funhouse-like multimedia installations, including automated furniture, as well as films of dream-like ceremonies inspired by high school year book photos of pageants, sports matches and theater productions. In December 2005, Village Voice art critic Jerry Saltz described "Day is Done" as a pioneering example of "clusterfuck aesthetics," the tendency towards overloaded multimedia environments in contemporary art.
Kelley was also in the band Poetics with fellow California Institute of the Arts students John Miller and Tony Oursler.^{[citation needed]}
Kelley's work is inspired by as diverse sources as history, philosophy, politics, underground rock music, decorative arts and working-class artistic expression. His art often examines class and gender issues as well as issues of normality, criminality and perversion.