Day is donewritten and directed by Mike Kelley
Day Is Done, a major new video work by Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley, is a feature-length musical. It enunciates a career-long interest in American subcultures and folk events through the re-staging of 31 carnivalesque productions intermixed into a meandering semi-narrative. Each reconstruction is a live-action scene that has been extrapolated from photographs found in high school yearbooks. Their subjects are the kinds of institutionalized entertainments practiced within the American education system or the work place. These include such familiar diversions from the day-to-day routine as dress-up days, memorial speeches, religious spectacles, fashion shows, singles mixers, and musical follies. The actors have been cast based on their resemblance to the figures in the found photographs, and the sets eerily recreate the original locales: harshly spot-lit stages, bland institutional hallways, meeting rooms, and gymnasiums. While each chapter of Day Is Done is derived entirely from an image of a quite standardized folk ritual, Kelley disrupts the traditional structures of such events to construct a dizzying daisy chain of performances that results in an institutional landscape populated by dancing Goths, singing vampires, hick story-tellers, horse dancers, and the Virgin Mary. Originally presented as a 50 channel video/sculpture installation at the Gagosian Gallery New York, in December of 2005, this version of Day is Done has been re-edited into a single channel format for private viewing.
Objectifieda film by Gary Hustwit
Plexifilm, c2009
Objectified is a feature-length documentary about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. In his second film, director Gary Hustwit (Helvetica) documents the creative processes of some of the world's most influential product designers, and looks at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. What can we learn about who we are, and who we want to be, from the objects with which we surround ourselves?
The myth of the liberal media the propaganda model of news
Northampton, MA : Media Education Foundation, c2002
