Black Out (Detroit River)

Mike Kelley was particularly interested in how the notions of the individual and the subjective are formed by familial and institutional power structures in postmodern capitalist American society. In this work, the artist summons a theory that had become fashionable at that time of the repression of traumatic memories, according to which our memory prevents us from accessing certain recollections.

To make this series, Mike Kelley returned to the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan where he grew up. In sailing along the Detroit River, Kelley photographed various places along the river’s edge, almost panoramically. When he developed the film, he realised that, due to a technical problem, the film had been obstructed and that most of the area in each image had remained black. The artist seized on these black areas as an appropriate metaphor for black-outs, zones that he couldn’t remember and that may have been caused by a trauma.

Installed in a row and aligned along the same horizon line, the images create a spectacle of a multifaceted, furtive landscape. Kelley compared this arrangement to the sensation that a child might have sleeping in the backseat of a car, waking up occasionally to discover a new landscape each time.

The Pinault Collection first showed this work in 2023 at the Bourse de Commerce, as part of the exhibition Mike Kelley. Ghost and Spirit.