Robischon Gallery is pleased to present Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick’s third solo exhibition featuring large and small-scale panoramic photographs alongside paintings and sculptures from the artists’ newest collaborative series. Customary to all of Kahn + Selesnick’s highly imaginative and spirited works, elaborate fictions merge with historical fact to offer cautionary, if absurdist, tales of human quests. The artists’ recognizable theatrical imagery serves their mission well – a nonsensical conflation of gravity and whimsy in multi-layered, colorful worlds which bridge to realms both bizarre and visionary.
On this latest series, curator, Barbara Räcker writes:
” Kahn & Selesnick describe their latest series, Truppe Fledermaus (Bat Troupe), as “The Carnival at the End of the World – white nose fungus induced nightmares, madness in the greensward. Here we sing in the dead neighborhoods, abandoned suburbs, forgotten carnivals, of dead dreams and passing things.” In Truppe Fledermaus’s Memory Theater, a troupe of actors, dressed as bats, “greenmen” and “death dancers,” rove the countryside performing only for animals. In the magic realist story that accompanies the photographs, two members of the troupe, Herr Orlofsky and Dr. Falke, leave a train, carrying their props and costumes, in search of a distant tower they saw rising from the “water meadows.” Try as they might, they cannot reach the tower. After trudging through flooded fields and around impenetrable thickets, they ask directions from an almost incomprehensible local farmer who tells them about a bridge to the tower. Unable to find the bridge, Orlofsky wades into a canal, dropping his bag of props and losing the ghost bat costume in an underground culvert. The story ends with: Above me, dark shapes swooped through the night air, undoubtedly the local fledermausen conducting their nocturnal feast of marsh insects, little knowing that their poor white queen lies lost forever in the underworld (Kahn and Selesnick 29).
The tower is the promise of a brighter future in the modern (technological) world. In their attempts to reach it, Orlofsky and Falke lose their most important possession. Kahn and Selesnick borrowed the characters’ names from Johann Strauss’s 1874 operetta Die Fledermaus, a farce in which costumed partygoers are manipulated by Dr. Falke for the entertainment of the bored Prince Orlofsky. Falke also intends to seek good-natured revenge on the main character who abandoned him, drunk and dressed as a bat, in a public square. In the end, calling it the “bat’s revenge,” they agree that “the blame for any misdemeanors can be laid firmly at the door of King Champagne, O Fledermaus, O Fledermaus” (Lamb).
Kahn & Selesnick mix characters, time periods, and genres in their parables to create ambiguity and allow for suspension of disbelief. In this suspended time and place they are able to address societal issues, such as the fragile ecosystem (signaled by the extinction of bats from white-nose syndrome). Truppe Fledermaus is indebted to the literary tendency of the carnivalesque in which sociopolitical discourse through satire and humor is permissible. The mode is based on the medieval carnival in which those deprived of power enact the role of those with power to challenge authority and the status quo (Bowers 70). Kahn & Selesnick turn the tables though, when the empowered human dresses as a bat to warn us of our shortsightedness. The troupe is “preaching to the choir” by performing only for the animals, because those ultimately in power (scientists and government officials) are not listening. ”
Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick have been collaborating as Kahn & Selesnick since 1988 on a series of complex narrative photo-novellas and sculptural installations. They were both born in 1964, in New York City and London respectively. They met at Washington University in St Louis where they collaborated informally from 1982 to 1986 as photography majors. After graduation and a couple of years of showing their art separately they migrated to Cape Cod, Massachusetts to work on an evolving series of projects, some painting based, some photography based, all involving fictional attributions, narratives, and sculpture.
EXHIBITION
Kahn + Selesnick
Robischon Gallery
March 14 through May 4, 2013
1740 Wazee Street
Denver, CO 80202
USA
