Mike Kelley
Reconstructed History

Mike Kelley’s Reconstructed History is a collection of idealized images of a shared American heritage. Culled from scholastic textbooks, the images presume to have been found and randomly defaced by grade-school students, then bound in the form of a high-school yearbook. Kelley adjoins illustration and grotesquery at the deliberate expense of historical specificity, and renders a timely portrait of American values. Reconstructed History includes reproductions of photographs, engravings and cartoons, as well as written text by the author which informs and provokes questions about the use of reconstructed narratives to illuminate the past.  Investigating the tension between the tarnished and the exalted, Kelley shows us how, in his own words, “heroic images thrive on subtraction.”