Fiontán Moran – författare

Mike Kelley (1954–2012) is widely considered one of the most influential artists of our time, with an irreverent and visionary practice that spanned and mixed performance, installation, drawing, painting, video, photography, sound, text and sculpture.Ghost and Spirit looks at his dense and colourful body of work, from early performances, to his iconic stuffed toy works, and on to his explorations of history, memory and trauma as they haunt our experiences of school or family. Asking prescient questions about how to exist among a world of media images, about the role of art and the artist, and about embodiment, Kelley adopted different personas and mediums, deliberately deflating his own status, and from his own position as a white, heterosexual man in postmodern, capitalist America, he challenged assumptions about identity, class and institutional authority.Bringing together a range of diverse perspectives which summon his ‘lingering influence’ (to paraphrase the artist), this book captures the complexity and persistent relevance of Kelley’s extraordinary practice.

New York-based artist Lyle Ashton Harris spent his adolescence living between New York City and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. This formative period informs his wide-ranging artistic practice in photography, collage, installation and performance — making a commentary on the societal constructs of gender, desire, and race; the complexities of African and African American experience; and his own identity as a queer, Black man."I think it's important to talk about the triumph of laying claim to an experience and rechannelling its energy into creative expression that will go back out into the culture where an intergenerational transmission can take place."