nicholas kahn & richard selesnick

Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick, both born in 1964 are mixed media photography/installation artists who have been collaborating since the late 1980's as Kahn/Selesnick.  They create fictional place, history, and narrative through elaborate photo-collage, photography, painting, artifact and dramatic staging.  Each series is constructed as a novella, a piece of time, usually based on an actual event, however manipulated and cut using mash/ups of images that evoke in the viewer the feeling of a hidden place that has just been discovered, that we have stumbled upon out of a dream.

They create histories.  In 2007 the pair released their project entitled Eisbergfreistadt, which consisted of the creation of a fictional iceberg turned into a principality off the coast of Lubeck, Germany.  Every detail was accounted for in this exhibition including producing architectural models, period clothing, and even creating currency and bank notes to further the sense of the "reality" vs "non/reality" that pervades every aspect of their work.  

Kahn/Selesnick give the viewer the sense that nothing is really "real" in the contemporary world; we are all just models of an earlier past, copies or in a sense, floating with no idea of who we are or where we came from.  Their photos create worlds, destroy seemingly absolute fact, and most importantly ask us to question the concept of "history" and "our history" as a whole.  What relationship do we hold to the past?  Why is this necessary?  

We are assaulted with these absolutely stunning, surrealist, massively detailed and interesting works yet the emotion that we experience is common and easily understood.  I particularly enjoy the question that is asked, is begged to be answered, when we view these works.  I am left with a sense that I have never learned anything.  That everything I know to be true is a lie.  Yet at the same time there is an undercurrent of whimsical innocence and playfulness that allows me to be alright with this state of unknowing.