Mike Kelley, perhaps one of the most influential American artists of the past half-century, died Tuesday evening at the age of 57.

Kelley's work contained the sort of imagery that might creep into the periphery of your subconscious even if you weren't particularly up to date on the workings of the contemporary art world. You might recognize his work from the cover of the Sonic Youth album Dirty, which features one of Kelley's photographic collages. The collage juxtaposes low quality photographs of discarded stuffed toys with Kelley's own high school senior portrait. The almost overbearing metaphor hangs bare in its simplicity, yet reverberates with a pathos unique to the entirety of Kelley's work.

Mike Kelley created one of my favorite pieces ever to grace a canvas. You might call it a collage, although I suppose some would consider it more of a sculptural piece. It's a collection of found stuffed toys taken apart and stitched together with baby blankets across a large canvas. It's entitled "More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid". If the title alone doesn't stir some part of you deep in the bottom of your spine, I have my doubts that you're fully human. It's a poem in one phrase, and the content of the work itself further compounds the unbearable pathos.

It was Kelley's fascination with the cast-off material of the world that drove his work into those deep and ethereally sad places. What happens to the objects we love once we grow older, move out, die? What remains of us in the junk matter we shed like old skins? What kinds of memory can we contain within objects, and what do we lose when we lose those objects?

The loss of Kelley will be felt deeply throughout the entire art world. I can't think of another artist who transformed the junk of the world into palpable objects of emotion quite in the same way that he did. The self-effacement present in much of his work becomes an effacement of humanity itself, and yet it's ultimately empowering rather than degrading. We are human, maybe, because of all the things we love and have to lose. We're human and maybe it isn't much, but it's all we've got for now. It's terrifying in its way, but that sense of loss could be one of the rawest strains of emotion I've ever found in visual art.

I'll miss that soft, sad lens through which Mike Kelley saw the world.