Southeast Chapter ConferenceSpeakers

Nicholas Kahn

Saturday, October 11, 2014 @ 5:00pm, Jenkins Fine Art Center Speight Auditorium

The Art of Collaboration: 25 years of of telling tall tales in Photos, Installation, and Mixed Media

Nicholas Kahn is one half of the collaborative artist team know as Kahn & Selesnick. Nicholas met Richard Selesnick at art school at Washington University in St.Louis in the early 1980's and they have been formally collaborating since 1988 . He was born in 1964, in New York City. They work primarily in the fields of photography and installation art, specializing in fictitious histories set in the past or future. These may include: documentary-style panoramic and square photographs that combine absurdist fantasy and bogus anthropology; elaborately crafted artifact, costumes and sculpture, often constructed of unlikely materials such as bread or fur, painting and drawings ranging from large scale works on plaster to pages of conceptual doodling.Their current work features the recreation of the famousTruppe Fledermaus's Memory Theatre of 1932 with its full complement of Batfolk, Greenmen, Rope-Slingers, and Death-Dancers in all their Carnivalesque glory. Kahn & Selesnick have participated in over 100 solo and group exhibitions worldwide and have work in over 20 collections, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution. In addition, they have published 3 books with Aperture Press, Scotlandfuturebog. , City of Salt, and Apollo Prophecies.