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Kandors

July 15, 2009: Mike Kelley's Kandors Exhibit

For some time now artist Mike Kelley has been exhibiting his "Kandors" art creations, a series of works inspired by the Bottled City of Kandor found in Superman comic books. The exhibition was originally shown at the Jablonka Galerie in Berlin in 2007.

The Super Punch blogspot has a complete article on the "Kandors" exhibit, including photos and a video.

    The exhibition of new works by Mike Kelley at the Jablonka Galerie features sculptures, lenticular lightboxes, and videos related to the fictional city of Kandor, the capitol of Superman's home planet Krypton. According to the Superman mythos, Kandor is the only remaining vestige of the exploded Krypton, and the city is preserved, in a reduced state, in a bottle in Superman's possession. Interestingly, the image of Kandor was never codified and the numerous representations of it in the comic book throughout the years vary widely in appearance. In this exhibition Kelley reconstructs ten unique versions of Kandor, with its enclosing bottle, which, despite obvious differences, purport to depict the same city. Thus, Kandor - as an eternally maintained, but constantly reconfigured, relic of Superman's childhood - is an apt symbol of Kelley's interests in the vagaries of memory, and relates to his own works that refer to Repressed Memory Syndrome, such as Educational Complex (1995), an architectural model made up of replicas of every educational institution that the artist ever attended, with the sections he cannot remember left blank. Such issues were foregrounded in an earlier work by Kelley that also focused on the theme of Kandor: Kandor-Con 2000, which was presented at the exhibition Zeitwenden at the Kunstmuseum Bonn in 2000.

"Kandors" is currently on display during the opening of the Punta della Dogana in Venice, Italy.

Visit the Super Punch blog for the complete article and see a series of images from the "Kandors" exhibit at the Jablonka Galerie website.

Thanks to Jef-El and Car-El for the link to this article.


2009 Merchandise & Miscellaneous News

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