Mike Kelley, More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin, 1987
From Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 (Kids)
Nov 6, 2019
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Mike Kelley, More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin, 1987
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Narrator: How many stuffed animals do you have? This many?! How many are here, anyway?
Mike Kelley scoured thrift stores and scooped up handmade toys and blankets that other people had given away. Toys they had once played with, and then gotten tired of.
By giving this work the title More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid, Kelley is imagining that someone who makes a toy or blanket by hand needs to be paid back. If someone’s grandma spent two weeks making her grandson a sock monkey, how much love does the grandkid owe her? Is it really possible to pay her back? Grandmas have a lot of love, what if you CAN’T? How does THAT make you feel?
