Like dreams, the collaborative photographs of Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick blur reality and unreality, transporting viewers to impossible if sometimes momentarily plausible worlds.
Though aspects of the images are identifiable and even realistic, as the places and people in dreams often are, they jumble time periods and inevitably venture into the make-believe and mysterious.
Thirty selections, offering a comprehensive overview of the duo’s fantastical creations, can be seen through May 27 in “Panoramas and Artifacts: 1996-2006,” their first exhibition at the Robischon Gallery.
These strange yet incontestably alluring images should prove appealing to a broad range of viewers, including or perhaps especially those who do not typically frequent art or photography shows.
The work of Kahn and Selesnick, who both earned bachelor of fine arts degrees from Washington University in St. Louis in 1986, has been reproduced in Time and Aperture magazines and shown in dozens of exhibitions nationwide.
Examples can be found in the collections of such major institutions as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Although photographers have been manipulating and manufacturing images since virtually the invention of photography, the medium continues to be viewed as a documentary tool, a way to essentially fix a moment in time.
This artistic duo exploits that well-held perception, working so hard to create the illusion of documentation that they concoct detailed explanations for the four sets of photographs and even display “artifacts” from the worlds they depict.
While the fiction of these images becomes clear almost immediately, flickers of plausibility surround particularly the set of images titled “The Circular River.” They create a fictional chronicle of the life of a real historical figure, glider pilot Peter Hesselbach.
The panoramic photographs suggest a National Geographic expedition from early in the 20th century to some remote land, where supposed scenes of Hesselbach and his body-mounted glider wings commingle with tribal figures, vintage airplanes and researchers.
To add to the historical effect, the images are sepia-toned with fold marks, as though they had been carried a great distance in a knapsack and are now quite old, and marked with handwritten notes and archival stamps.
In this series and in all their works, Kahn and Selesnick act almost as movie directors, inventing complex scenarios and building elaborate sets and properties. The resulting images possess a narrative, cinematic quality.
While the dreamlike quality of earlier works like those in “The Circular River” is achieved entirely through such theatrical means, the more recent creations up the ante by incorporating digital technology as well.
Although it is easy to imagine invented worlds of this kind having a whimsical, storybook quality, a vaguely dark, sometimes even unsettling feeling hangs over these images.
This is especially true in the series “Scotlandfuturebog,” in which Kahn and Selesnick envision a bog-dwelling race after an apocalypse. “Turfegg/Torfsamen,” for example, depicts two naked figures huddled atop a boulder with a forbidding, rocky landscape in the background.
But perhaps because they are rooted in such a familiar historical reality, the most disturbing series is arguably “The Apollo Prophecies,” in which the duo offers fictional variations on scenes from the Apollo missions, often with a Buck Rogers-like quality.
But if NASA improbably meets Rube Goldberg in some of the images, such as “Lunar Procession,” the image of a returning space capsule on fire in “Crash Landing II” cannot but have a haunting effect in light of the Apollo 1 and Challenger disasters.
Immediately identifiable and hauntingly beautiful, Kahn and Selesnick’s odd, existential fantasies speak powerfully to the fragility and vulnerability of the human condition.
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-820-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
“Panoramas and Artifacts: 1996-2006”
Through May 27|Photographs by Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick|Robischon Gallery, 1740 Wazee St.|Free|11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays (303-298-7788 or robischongallery.com)
