Nonmemory
Curated by Jay Ezra Nayssan
in Collaboration with The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts
Hauser & Wirth, Downtown Los Angeles
September 15, 2023 - January 24, 2024
Curated by Jay Ezra Nayssan, ‘Nonmemory’ brings together seminal works by Mike Kelley and a group of seven contemporary artists – Kelly Akashi, Meriem Bennani, Beatriz Cortez, Raúl de Nieves, Olivia Erlanger, Lauren Halsey and Max Hooper Schneider – whose works all play with the role of memory as it posits our perceptions of space and place. Through a variety of media and material, the artists in this exhibition use space as the repository for dreams, fantasies, traumas and anxieties, while offering opportunities to re-imagine and recreate reality. The title of the exhibition ‘Nonmemory,’ takes direct inspiration from Kelley’s use of the term, a way of treating, reordering and representing the complex and unstable relationship between memory, space and identity.
Beginning with ‘Educational Complex’ (1995) and ending with ‘Mobile Homestead’ (2005 – 13), the second half of Mike Kelley’s career was largely devoted to exploring the porousness of memory in relation to space, producing extraordinary fantasy structures and imaginary landscapes that manifested a new ‘psychic reality.’ Kelley’s architectural and environmental reformulations arose from the ‘non-memory’ of various institutional spaces or built environments he encountered throughout his life: from every school he attended, to a wishing well in the Chinatown district of Los Angeles, to representations of Kandor, and finally to Kelley’s own childhood home in Detroit, Michigan.
More at: https://mikekelleyfoundation.org/