Their projects achieve this through several routes. Each typically begins with a period of intense research into images, texts, histories, among other things, to help frame the piece in a visual and textual narrative. During this period, the two will hone in on other interests, like science or economics; for their Eisbergfreistadt piece, detailing a failed German iceberg colony, Kahn found himself drawn into 1920s-era hyperinflation in Germany – fueled, in part, by memories of playing with million-Mark notes that his father brought back from the war.
After making sure that each project is a “rabbit-hole” that they’d like to chase for several years, they start drafting costumes and props, fleshing out their world and making the fantastical actual. These can be full-body suits, but also scale models that, through trickery, spring to life-size. The photographs themselves can be taken in a number of ways. “Some are shot in the studio against a very neutral backdrop, and then we shoot the landscape separately,” explains Kahn. Others are shot on location.
Often, this is just the foreground. The backgrounds are mainly composed of dozens of composite images, used to realize a fictional place. For their Hour Glass Sea series, set on a fantastical Mars, Selesnick used Photoshop to combine shots of Death Valley, Cape Cod and actual Mars in order to achieve, in his own words, “our idea about Mars [more] than strictly what Mars looks like.” He maintains collections of images on his home computer that Selesnick tinkers with until he creates his desired effect. Pre-Photoshop, as I saw in one working photo from Circular River, this was done by cutting and pasting physical bits of photograph into a matte not dissimilar from what one might find in an older Hollywood movie.
This is certainly a simplification of their process, as some projects, like Greenman, contain no landscapes whatsoever. But what they frequently achieve are stunning, surreal vistas, strung together in narratives that touch on history, biology, the rise and fall of empires, Paganism et cetera. “I love the elaborate conceptual worlds that they create to inspire and inhabit their work, and the way that they enlarge and modify these worlds every time they present them,” Jonathan Meiburg told me in an e-mail. Meiburg is the core songwriter in Shearwater, a band that has collaborated with Kahn & Selesnick for their last three album covers. When I first saw the cover for 2008’s Rook, I was swept up by the image: A man (Kahn in costume) stands in an overcoat and rubber boots on a rocky, forlorn shore, every crevice of his body filled with the black tidal birds. It’s a sense of wonder that I feel often in their work, which I explored more after experiencing that first piece.
Though on occasion they get contract work, as with Shearwater and an Australian metal band whose name they had a hard time remembering, the two do most of their work as installations. Kahn describes it as “a big sculptural mess that kind of bounces off the photos – sometimes writing on the walls, sometimes not.” Adds Selesnick, “It’s supposed to be a completely immersive experience, whether it’s in a smaller gallery or a larger non-profit space.” And Kahn again: “Usually, our thing is that seeing a show feels like reading a novel, and you get clues from all different elements – feel, sound, smell, all different things that fill in those, that weird shit that’s all over, in display cabinets or in piles – and hopefully, you piece together the plot from all these little clues.” For their most recent show, Truppe Fledermaus, as well as a related spinoff called Animal/Vegetable/Mineral, this involved building human-size Greenman statues, scattering photographs on a table and printing up a smaller book of images, hopefully to be published one day for the “esoteric but somewhat fanatical” fans.
Fittingly for such outlandish art – the kind that winks at a balance “between humor and gravity,” to quote Meiburg – Kahn and Selesnick named a disparate series of influences during the course of our interview. To list some: Stanley Kubrick, narrative photographer Dwayne Michaels, William Blake, Picasso and “esoteric New Age” scientist Rupert Shelldrake. Once explained, their fingerprints seem all over K & S’s work; yet when considering the pieces individually or as collections, the sheer abnormality of them drowns out these touchstones.
But it is this strangeness out of which their worlds are built, whether in terms of costumes and props or backstories and backgrounds. To mouse through one of the galleries on their website, https://kahnselesnick.com, is to be enveloped in another dimension, full of collapsed Martian civilizations and harvest-time rituals and what comes after the end of the world. Meiburg ended our e- mail exchange with the following: “If I found out they were actually visitors from another time (time tourists of the future, for example), I wouldn’t be astonished.” I can’t help but agree.
