Soccer Club Club is delighted to announce A Return to the Rec Room by artist Michael Smith, curated by Jay Sanders.

Michael Smith has produced performance works, commercial television, promotional business video simulations, adult puppet shows, immersive installations, drawings and photographs, often in collaboration with other artists and directors such as Mike Kelley, Doug Skinner and Joshua White. His deadpan, pathos-laden style of humor draws on influences including 1960s comics Jackie Vernon, fellow Chicagoans Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart, actor-directors Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, playwrights and authors Samuel Beckett, Alfred Jarry and Dale Carnegie and TV shows from his youth.

For five decades, Smith’s groundbreaking work has pushed the limits of entertainment, comedy and art from within. With unconventional pacing, repetition, precise timing, subversive obtuseness, and a blurring of fiction and reality, Smith has plumbed the depths of American culture through his two performance personae, Mike and Baby Ikki. His work often lampoons the practices and promises of the entertainment industry, art world and American capitalism, exploring themes of fitting in, ambition, the obsolescence of “just past” motifs and tastes, failure and aging.

A Return to the Rec Room will feature a variety of Smith’s work throughout the years, from the 1970’s onward – videos, drawings, performance documentation, and installations.

This exhibition’s opening coincides with the imminent release of Smith’s career spanning 8-DVD boxset, MIKE’S BOX (co-produced by ARTPIX and Moikai), a comprehensive collection of work from the 70’s to the present available to the public on May 30th. The boxset is accompanied by a richly illustrated 128-page catalog with an essay by Tim Griffin, and documentation from exhibitions at international venues like The Tate Modern, London, MoMA and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City and the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, as well as filmed conversations between the artist, curators and collaborators.

Michael Smith (born 1951 in Chicago, IL)is an American artist known for his performance, video, and installation works. His early performances took place at avant-garde venues in New York City including The Kitchen, Franklin Furnace, and Artists Space, as well as iconic downtown clubs such as CBGB and the Mudd Club. He eventually performed in other, more mainstream clubs and institutions, such as The Bottom Line, Carolines, the Whitney Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. He produced videos for Saturday Night Live and PBS and a comedy special for Cinemax. In more recent years, he has exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Tate Modern, among others. Smith has received many fellowships and honors from notable organizations, including the National Endowment for the Arts, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. A career-spanning retrospective DVD box, MIKE’S BOX, will be released on May 30 via Jim O’Rourke’s Drag City imprint Moikai.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: A Return to the Rec Room, Chicago, Hermosa, Michael Smith, Soccer Club Club