Chattanooga Pulse

The Cress Gallery happily presents collaborator artists Nicholas Miles Kahn and Richard Selesnick with their renowned presentations of “The Apollo Prophecies” and “Eisbergfreistadt” (“Iceberg Free State”). Ruth Grover, curator, believes this show to be a very fortunate entry in the ongoing John and Diane Marek Visiting Artist Series.

Media involved include performative photography, video and sculpture. The work from these installations features intricate and consummate execution, but the conception of the work remains the most challenging element. These artists of surreal history, ranging from icy wilderness to outer space, produce a vertiginous grasping for reference of the real and a satirical indictment of presumed real history.

A kind of history of such aesthetic enterprises may be found in Matt Glass’s Constructed Realities in the Age of Photography (see www.glassbrain.com).

Down on Earth, we may not notice floating, airless moon rocks decorating the space around our familiar moon, nor do typical photographs show the ruins of tiny colonies a century old. Here we are indebted to Kahn and Selesnick for their panoramic photographic documentation of valiant Edwardians in their buffalo space coats pondering the temporal mysteries of the lunar inter-planetary threshold.

In this new millennium of information overload, we may gasp at the loss of cultural products and the confusion of fact and legend. Melies’s A Trip to the Moon (a very early film) and the moon novels of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells documented this imaginative soaring to embrace our colder sister, first neighbor in space. I’ll leave it to you to discover the uncanny astonishment that greeted these intrepid Edwardians and that fueled their meditations while they mined moon rocks for air!

Kahn and Selesnick are currently pursuing a NASA grant to document the Martian surface. Perhaps they will discover the significance of the strange face on Mars, or unriddle the paradox of distant familiarity on the Red Planet.

“Eisbergfriestadt” elegantly explores the microcosm of Lubeck, a German port city, when an iceberg drifts into its waters, and opportunistic capitalism exploits this icy environment. The viewer wades through a landslide of detritus from the aftermath. Here, a precious antique marzipan iceberg, there, a wheelbarrow full of “notgeld”, the local super-inflated currency, a “kartenspiel” card deck faces a wall witness to the intricate minutiae of Lubeck’s historic adventure.

However you may arrive at this internationally acclaimed exhibition at the Cress Gallery, be prepared to rest in temporal dislocation and gaze at surreal archetypes so curiously indifferent to your stares.

KAHN AND SELESNICK: Work from “The Apollo Prophesies” and “Eisbergfreistadt” projects
Cress Gallery of Art, UTC Fine Arts Building, Vine & Palmetto Streets
Through March 16. (423) 425-4600.
www.utc.edu/cressgallery