Consolation Prize brings together recent works by influential American artists Mike Kelley and John Miller. Both artists conceived new mixed-media projects specifically for this Vancouver exhibition. John Miller’s Lugubrious Game is a life-sized mock game show set celebrating the debasement of human dignity under capitalism and the culture industry. Mike Kelley’s Surrogates series of soft sculptures with audio components offer up a Reichian solution to the epidemic of loneliness that characterizes contemporary American existence. The critical strategies and subversive humour of these artists’ work are built on an equally important foundation of formal rigour and art historical perspicacity which is often overlooked.
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