Nostalgia in Day is Done

In 2005, Mike Kelly presented "Day is Done," a project that appropriated found images of high school ceremonies and yearbook portraits into a series of performances, sound works and installations. Reproducing these images and events alongside the original documentation, Kelly created doubles of these rituals and thus created an uncanny work of fact and fiction, memory and reality. The resulting work presents a personal utopia/ dystopia through one's nostalgia for simpler days and the recognition that memory romanticizes the past and inevitably distorts the reality we so strongly miss.