600 S Michigan Ave
Chicago, Illinois 60605

Known for creating whimsical and elaborately constructed photographs, drawings, and sculptures, Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick have been spinning wild visual tales together for more than twenty years. Their practice involves dreaming up complex fictional narratives based on real historical events and injecting them with a wry sense of humor, while sparking new considerations of history and time. Both born in 1964, the artists were five years old when they watched the first American spaceship land on the moon. Kahn & Selesnick's most recent project, 'Mars: Adrift on the Hourglass Sea,' features two female protagonists wandering aimlessly in a bizarre Martian landscape. As in the Apollo project, someone has been there before them, and they encounter detritus from the mysteriously vacated civilization including pyramids, obelisks, giant balloons, and concrete boats. Comprising photographs taken by NASA's Mars rovers and by the artists themselves in the Nevada and Utah deserts, these landscapes have a surreal quality. Inspired by Edmund Burke's quote from 1756: "Terror is in all cases the ruling principle of the sublime," Kahn and Selesnick's view of humankind and the universe is as frightening as it is beautiful. By blending references to various time periods, both past and future, their work probes our conception of time as a linear phenomenon. In their absurdity and ambiguity they reveal our deep-seated need to cling to what we think we know, and provoke us to let go and experience the fanciful.

Added by Upcoming Robot on December 21, 2010