Mike Kelley: Memory Ware, A Survey

Over the course of his influential four-decade career, Mike Kelley generated a remarkably diverse oeuvre in an array of mediums, conflating high and low culture, critiquing prevailing aesthetic conventions and colliding the sacred with the profane. In his materially and conceptually complex artistic output, his celebrated Memory Ware series holds a prominent place. They embody the thematic engagement with memory-related concerns that informed the second half of the artist’s career—his exploration of the way in which we remember, represent, and reconstruct the past. This publication represents the definitive survey of the series, reproducing the approximately 100 Memory Ware and associated works that Kelley created alongside an insightful text by Ralph Rugoff.