Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick are a pair of artists who create imaginary places and faux histories that are mythic, funny, and surreal. Working in collaboration, they make elaborate series of photographs and text documenting invented histories, geographies, and cultures. Born in New York City (Kahn) and London (Selesnick), they now work out of a studio in Brooklyn, New York. You can view their work on their new website -- but be prepared to spend some time there, for it's full of fabulous pictures and stories.
One Kahn-Selesnick project is The Greenman, for which they interviewed "locals" from an imaginary British village (dressing them up in various Greenman guises clearly inspired by Arcimboldo paintings) and "discovered" faux-historic Greenman Day photos from rural Germany. Another project, The City of Salt, contains imagery and stories from a wholly invented metropolis. "Behind the city," they write, "beneath its every surface, is a hidden landscape, a mythological topology, the universal destination of our dream explorations, forever half-remembered, a lost Eden."
Scotland Future Bog is a hilarious, surreal glimpse of Scotland in an imaginary future. Discussing The Bakers photograph from this series, Kahn said:"We created this image during a residency at Philips-Andover working with the students and teachers in the giant studio. We designed and built rubber garments with the students and then bought all the bread the Italian bakery in Lawrence Massachusetts could sell us. It's based loosely on the composition of Andrea Mantegna's great Renaissance painting cycle "The Triumphs of Caesar," but set after the apocalypse in some remote soggy corner of Scotland, the rival clans returning with their baked spoils of war. But we prefer to leave all this as a mystery, an unfathomable absurd future that seems to be racing at us whether we like it or not in the guise of a code orange alert."
Other projects include an invented history of flight and the mapping of a circular river. In addition to the new Kahn-Selesnick website, and the older Kahn-Selesnick homepage, you can see their work on the Carl Hammer Gallery and Pepper Gallery websites.
Really love these guys' work. I'll pass around a link to my friends regarding your post
Stu
Posted by: Stu Jenks | March 21, 2007 at 11:05 AM