A driving force of contemporary art, Mike Kelley produced a multifaceted oeuvre during his four-decade long career that included, but was not limited to, photography, painting, sculpture, video, performance, and a formidable body of critical and creative writing. His work conflates high and low forms of popular culture while examining social relations, cultural identity, and systems of belief, which are underscored by Kelley’s idiosyncratic approach to art making. While Kelley lived and worked in Los Angeles, his practice inspired not only his peers and students, but also a subsequent generation of artists internationally.
‘Ectoplasm Photographs’ captures Kelley’s interest in spiritualist, symbolist and pictorialist photography. Enveloped in darkness, Kelley’s otherworldly face repeatedly confronts the viewer across fifteen chromogenic prints. Resonating with notions of Spiritualism—a belief that departed souls can interact with the living—Kelley assumes the role of a psychic medium. A white, cloudlike substance, ectoplasm, flows from his orifices, denoting a paranormal, viscous energy exuded from the body during a spiritual ritual. In one photograph, Kelley drapes a stuffed animal—a sock monkey—in white gauze, emulating the spirit itself.
Veiled in shadow and simultaneously bathed in direct light, these exceptionally rendered self-portraits reveal the artist’s engagement with the aesthetics of occultism and the performative, exploring boundaries of the self and other, the natural and supernatural. Inspired by early 20th Century spirit photography, ‘Ectoplasm Photographs’ belongs to a series of photographs—which includes another seminal work ‘The Poltergeist’—that explored and addressed occult history. The two projects are closely linked as ‘Ectoplasm Photographs’ is comprised of several photographs originally taken in 1978 for ‘The Poltergeist’ (completed in 1979).
Kelley’s engagement with photography dates back to 1976, when he began using 35-mm black-and-white photography. Kelley kept a diverse archive of material that informed numerous projects throughout his career such as ‘The Sublime’ (1984), ‘Reconstructed History’ (1989), ‘Dust Balls’ (1994), and the ‘Day Is Done’ (2005). Abandoning the documentary and aesthetic traditions of photography, Kelley harnessed the medium as a quasi-sociological tool, allowing him to explore connections and contradictions surrounding systems of identity, class and religion—among others—positioning him among the most astute cultural commentators of our time.