Nicholas Kahn

The Apollo Prophecies depicts, in one extravagantly long tritone panorama, an imagined expedition of 1960s American astronauts who land on the moon and discover a lost mission of Edwardian-era astronauts who greet them as long-awaited gods. These wildly inventive staged photographs, evidence of events that never happened, playfully question the role of photography in our sense of historical truth. Equal parts Jules Verne and Stanley Kubrick, with a touch of William Blake, the panoramic moonscape literally unfolds in multiple episodes that intermingle artifacts from the fearless era of early-twentieth-century exploration with space-age gadgetry. Kahn and Selesnick have combined real-life locations, miniature models and full-scale props of their own devising to produce a dramatic narrative where space-suited astronauts (most portrayed by the artists themselves, with a few similarly clad monkeys and elephants) reappear as events continue across the page. This is an Apollo lunar mission at once dreamlike, oddly familiar and utterly convincing. Its ingenious package includes the 19-foot-long two-sided panorama (58 pages when folded) and a 12-page booklet whose mind-bending narrative is illustrated with four-color mixed-media drawings. The limited edition also includes a signed and numbered lenticular image in an edition of 250 copies (viewed from one angle, it reveals an astronaut from the Edwardian era; from the other an astronaut from the 60s) and a 20-minute DVD documenting the lunar mission.

The Apollo Prophecies depicts, in one extravagantly long tritone panorama, an imagined expedition of 1960s American astronauts who, land on the moon and discover a lost mission of Edwardian-era astronauts who greet them as long-awaited gods. These wildly inventive staged photographs, evidence of events that never happened, playfully question the role of photography in our sense of historical truth. Equal parts Jules Verne and Stanley Kubrick, with a touch of William Blake, the panoramic moonscape literally unfolds in multiple episodes that intermingle artifacts from the fearless era of early-twentieth-century exploration with space age gadgetry. Kahn and Selesnick have combined real-life locations, miniature models and full-scale props of their own devising to produce a dramatic narrative where space-suit-clad astronauts (most portrayed by the artists themselves, with a few similarly clad monkeys and elephants) reappear as events continue across the page. This is an Apollo lunar mission at once dreamlike, oddly familiar and utterly convincing. Its ingenious package includes the 19-foot long two-sided panorama, (58 pages when folded) and a 12-page booklet whose mind-bending narrative is illustrated with four-color mixed-media drawings. The limited edition also includes a signed and numbered lenticular image in an edition of 250 copies (viewed from one angle, it reveals an austronaut from the Edwardian era, from the other it shows an austronaut from the sixties) and a twenty-minute DVD documenting the munar mision.

In Scotlandfuturebog, photographers Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick construct a strange world that they describe as being of “infinite promise that cannot possibly be described or communicated except by direct experience.” The characters we meet are bogdwellers, inhabitants of a planet emptied by an apocalyptic event. Left to perform obscure ceremonies in an intriguing but uninviting terrain, the bogdwellers exist in a historical vacuum. This is a first-edition slip-cased book, signed and numbered by the artists.
Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick have been collaborating for more than a decade. They have exhibited worldwide and their work is held in galleries, museums and private collections.
Scotlandfuturebog features a short story by Ben Marcus whose second novel, Notable American Women, was published in 2002 by Vintage.

Panoramic photographs of fantastical landscapes make a bizarre Baedeker to alternative realities in City of Salt, by Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick. The second volume, after Scotlandfuturebog, in an intended trilogy of such otherworldly guides juxtaposes those scenes with similarly inspired texts: Sufi tales, the writings of fabulist Italo Calvino, and parables by the artists themselves. The strange deserts, marshes, sandy shores, villages and fields are often traversed by wandering figures, frequently in peril or precariously alone. Kahn and Selesnick's process combines sculptural and photographic media. The artists first construct the intricately detailed worlds in three-dimensional miniatures and dioramas, then digitally photograph the scene and populate it with characters in allegorical, though intriguingly puzzling, tableaux.