Mike Kelley, Mobile Homestead Videos, 2010-12. Commissioned and produced by Artangel.
Following the success of the screenings of Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead at Tate Modern in May and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit through the summer, Artangel and the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts are pleased to announce two weeks of screenings in independent cinemas across London this November. The screenings coincide with a major survey of Mike Kelley’s work at MoMA PS1 in New York this autumn.
Mobile Homestead was the final work made by the great American artist Mike Kelley before his untimely death in 2012. The project involved Kelley building an exact replica of his childhood home, a 1950s suburban house in the Detroit suburb of Westland, with a special detachable façade that could be mounted on a chassis and driven around like a conventional mobile home.
This trilogy of remarkable documentary-style films charts the maiden voyage of the Mobile Homestead from downtown Detroit, along Michigan Avenue, to the ‘mothership’ that is the original Kelley home, and back again. Footage of the expedition is inter-cut with compelling testimonies from an array of people who live and work in Detroit, from bikers and prostitutes, to church officials and social workers, heroin addicts and heads of the automobile industry. A third film documents the opening ‘launch’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, where the completed Mobile Homestead stands today.
Mike Kelley, Mobile Homestead Film Trilogy, 2010-11
– Going West on Michigan Avenue from Downtown Detroit to Westland, 2010-11 (76:15 min).
– Going East on Michigan Avenue from Westland to Downtown Detroit, 2010-11 (76:17 min).
– Mobile Homestead Christening Ceremony and Launch, September 25, 2010, 2010-11 (55:01 min).
Going West on Michigan Avenue from Downtown Detroit to Westland is the first part of Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead trilogy. The film documents, in ‘real-time’, the journey of the replica to the original homestead, tracing en route the remarkable shift along Michigan Avenue from the urban to the suburban. In a sequence of interviews, Kelley brings us face to face with residents from the wealthy area of Dearborn, the impoverished black neighbourhoods of Inkster and the white, working-class outskirts of Wayne and Westland. Their personal stories and memories indicate the extraordinary diversity of a city with which the artist shares an ambivalent past.
Going East on Michigan Avenue from Westland to Downtown Detroit is the second part of Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead trilogy. The film documents the artist’s replica of his childhood residence as it journeys back along Michigan Avenue from the original Kelley home to its new location in the city centre, in a reversal of the so-called ‘white flight’ that occurred in the wake of the notorious riots of 1967. Interviews with an eclectic mix of local residents are underscored by Kelley’s characteristically dark humour and biting commentary, as the artist offers a bleak but revelatory picture of life in the Midwest.
Mobile Homestead Christening Ceremony and Launch, September 25, 2010 is the third film in Mike Kelley’s powerful trilogy about the construction of a full-scale replica of his childhood home in the Detroit suburb of Westland. Mobile Homestead was Kelley’s first public art project and the final work completed before his untimely death in 2012. This film documents the launch of the ‘mobile section’ of the homestead, in which speeches and performances by local poets and musicians are captured with Kelley’s lifelong sense of sceptical realism.
Commissioned by Artangel in association with the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts and the LUMA Foundation, with the generous support of the Artangel International Circle.
Book HERE : www.artangel.org.uk/homestead2013
