21 May 2011 to 9 July 2011
Gallery hours
Reception: Saturday, May 21st 6-8pm
The Kopeikin Gallery
2766 La Cienega Blvd
CA. 90034
Los Angeles, CA
California
North America
p: +1 310-385-5894
m:
f: +1 310 385-7964
w: www.kopeikingallery.com
Kahn & Selesnick Mars: Adrift on the Hourglass Sea
Dates: May 21st � July 9th, 2011
Kopeikin Gallery is pleased to announce our fifth exhibition by the collaborative team of Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick, �Mars: Adrift on the Hourglass Sea�. The exhibition opens on Saturday, May 21st with a reception with the artists from 6:00 � 8:00 and continues through July 9th. The exhibition is free and open to the public.
Kahn & Selesnick work lies at the intersection of historical fact, apocalyptic future and nerdy museology. Melding childlike playfulness with adult obsession, they create faux-historical narratives realized as photography, sculpture, and installation. �Adrift on the Hourglass Sea� is set on the planet Mars where the artists present a dark and powerful visage of a collapsed civilization on the red planet. Using photo-mosaics of the Martian landscape taken by NASA space rovers (they were recipients of a NASA commission to create work about Mars) and combining them with their own photographs of deserts in Nevada and Utah, the artists present their distinctive brand of sci-fi mysticism.
Depicting the adventures of two women and a child as they negotiate a path among the crumbling vestiges of a once inhabited landscape, we see the defunct remains of a civilization�s ruins (ambiguous circuitry, abandoned dish-structures, and enigmatic monoliths). Poignant issues of technology, economic and societal collapse, environmental disaster and existential philosophy are explored under the guise of a fantastical journey through the deserts of our neighbor planet.
With Mars: Adrift on the Hourglass Sea, Kahn & Selesnick have departed from previous, more �academic,� displays � where labeled artifacts were carefully presented in display cases and copious documentation of the expedition was presented in the form of a diary or log, or elaborately forged newspaper articles.� Their new deliberate ambiguity liberates the earthbound preoccupations of artist and viewer alike, enhancing the necessary suspension of disbelief. �This strengthens the impact of the show and allows it to be perceived more intuitively.� When rules of space and time are too obviously suspended, as in Oracle, 2010, where a blue-clad figure regards a half-sphere upon which stands a blue-clad figure regarding a half-sphere, and so on like self-consciously meta- Russian nesting dolls it�s hard not to be jolted by the impossibility of it all. Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick have collaborated for more than twenty years on projects including Scotlandfuturebog, 2000; City of Salt, 2001; and Apollo Prophesies, 2004, all published in books by Aperture Press. The work of Kahn & Selesnick is held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Addison Gallery of American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fogg Museum of Art, and the National Portrait Gallery, among others.
Adam Chapman The Starling Drawings
May 21st - July 9th Reception with the artist Saturday, May 21st from 6-8pm
"I seek to capture the fleeting, euphoric moments when the mechanics of the world flash briefly into focus. My work-in-progress continues to merge the dynamic possibilities of contemporary tools with the millennia-old tradition of mark-making. In looking at the future of drawing and representational imagery, I am exploring a system wherein rules govern discrete abstract elements that build a greater representational form. I apply the rules of natural phenomena to colored forms and lines. These natural dynamics are then altered so that the forms periodically combine to form representational drawings."
