Art 11 and 12 visited NEON's recent monographic exhibition of Mike Kelley (1954-2012) in Athens, Fortress of Solitude. The exhibition brings together a range of seminal works from across Kelley’s career in order to reflect on the uncanny psychological homelessness of the contemporary world.
Students were led through the space viewing found stuffed animals as emotional effigies of long lost childhood memories or evoking the psychic homelessness of Superman in the form of Kelley’s reconstructive exploration of the superhero’s inaccessible home city of Kandor that he kept in his Fortress of Solitude.
Our guided tour was led by a graduate of ISA, Stephen Giannoulis, who explained the wide variety of media from painting and sculpture to drawing, video and performance, which explore and critically engage various incarnations of the repressed side – or dark underbelly – of the American cultural unconscious.
