McCarthy is Kelley's closest conceptual peer, frequently collaborating with him and sharing an obsession with suburban dysfunction, corrupted American innocence, and the psychological trauma lurking beneath pop culture imagery. His mixed media installations use similarly dark juxtapositions to expose the repressed violence within idealized domestic and consumer narratives.

Pettibon's work similarly excavates the psychological darkness beneath American suburban and pop culture surfaces, using conceptual and postmodern strategies to reveal trauma and dysfunction coded within familiar imagery. His confrontational before and after narrative structures mirror the diptych logic Kelley employs to question constructed boundaries between innocence and experience.

Sherman's conceptual photography interrogates constructed cultural identities and psychological unease through staged visual juxtapositions, sharing Kelley's interest in exposing the darker psychological undercurrents beneath normalized social performances. Her postmodern approach to innocence, trauma, and the performed self aligns closely with the thematic territory of this diptych.