Memory Ware Flat #17

Mike Kelley has always been interested in countercultures and craft practices. Born in Detroit in 1954, he studied under conceptual artists Douglas Huebler and John Baldessari in Los Angeles. An artist, musician, curator, collector, and archivist, Kelley also uses appropriation, drawing inspiration from everyday objects, amateur practices, and popular imagery.
 

His "Memory Ware Flat" series, which began in the early 2000s, is inspired by a tradition that applies a decorative layer of trinkets and shells to ordinary household objects—vases, ashtrays, etc.—giving the objects a baroque, grotesque character (in the manner of the concretions imagined by Renaissance gardeners).
The series also recalls the popular funerary art of the American South with its “memory vessels”: vases or pots decorated with coins, small objects, or fragments of crockery. Kelley displaces this practice into the field of painting: the artist covers wooden panels with plaster where he fixes banal little kitschy pastel-coloured trinkets, associated with militant or community badges and insignia. 
 

An abundant, colourful mosaic, Memory Ware Flat #17 is a three-dimensional painting bustling with detail. Necklaces, pendants, bracelets, keys, buttons, buttons, pins and badges are glued onto a wooden panel with synthetic clay, resulting in a glittering maze that recalls the lavish design of an haute couture item.

Memory Ware Flat #17 is part of the "Memory Ware Flats" series that Kelley began making in the early 2000s. Inspired by a traditional Canadian folk art form consisting of covering domestic objects with small objects of high sentimental value, it puts found objects into a different context and creates an aesthetic that is both kitschy and baroque.

An exuberant work that uses the fluidity of jewellery to create abstract forms, Kelley's Memory Ware Flat #17 is in the Pinault Collection. It was first exhibited at the "Sequence 1" show at the Palazzo Grassi in 2007.