CHARLES DESMARAIS’ ART PICK

The continuing influence on young artists of Mike Kelley , who died more than half a decade ago (he committed suicide in 2012), is as hard to deny as it is to explain. Enigmatic artists rarely come across at the pitch of heavy metal music, and poets don’t often overwhelm with images at fire-hose volume. But Kelley struck a garage-band chord that reverberates through a strain of current art that celebrates the anarchic and delights in the abject.

The current exhibition at the David Ireland House, “Mike Kelley: Pushing and Pulling, Pulling and Pushing” (through Feb. 16), might appear a bit more tame. That’s because the selections were guided by relationships gathered around certain ideas Ireland, a Bay Area pioneer of conceptualism, had about shelter and the use of discarded (not “found” but redeemed) materials. Images of high school performances gleaned from old yearbooks are restaged by Kelley as photographs and a long video. His evocations of home are hung in Ireland’s resurrected house as mobile sculpture, a sketched plan, a “swag lamp.” One of his final works, the sprawling installation “Mechanical Toy Guts” (1991-2012), straddles a physical and psychological gap between dissection and destruction.

“Mike Kelley: Pushing and Pulling, Pulling and Pushing”: Artist-guided tours at 11 a.m. and 2 and 4 p.m. Wednesdays-Fridays; self-guided tours noon-5 p.m. Saturdays. Through Feb. 16. $10-$20. David Ireland House, 500 Capp St., S.F. 415-8729240. www.500cappstreet.org