Kahn + Selesnick
Dreams of the Drowning World

With “Dreams of the Drowning World,” Robischon Gallery presents its fifth solo exhibition from the widely-recognized, collaborative New York artist duo Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick. As a continuation of the arresting narrative begun in Kahn + Selesnick’s “Truppe Fledermaus and the Carnival at the End of the World,” the newest installment in the series, “Dreams of the Drowning World,” is an epilogue to the tale of the fictional, travelling theater troupe that performed plays at the edge of the world for no one. Evocative of a dissociated, dream-like state the Truppe characters have found themselves immersed, literally and figuratively, in the world’s rising waters. Kahn + Selesnick offer license to the viewer to interpret the series’ many-layered and complex meanings, as each imaginative work reveals a melding of vast and varied influences from human history through cultural references of art and literature, politics and events within the natural world. In this most current series, Kahn + Selesnick allude to the masterwork of John Everett Millais’ Ophelia, a painting inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as well as the dramatic occurrences of the 2011 Japanese earthquake and subsequent tsunami, New Orleans’ Hurricane Katrina and the Netherland’s ever shifting sea in the midst of a warming planet. All are referenced to further express a climate of fear both pervasive and cautionary which exists in each Kahn + Selesnick’s fictional tale and permeates the contemporary world.

As Kahn + Selesnick’s highly personal and dynamic visual lexicon continues to merge with art history, the artists’ imagery intentionally recalls the quick and fading floral forms of 17thC Dutch vanitas paintings, Rembrandt and the posed photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron. Further nodding to Millais’ Ophelia, each Kahn + Selesnick model featured in “Dreams of the Drowning World” was carefully costumed and then submerged into a marshy wetland with select objects of import while photographed from above in the artists’ signature, hard-won cinematic approach.

In the extended tale of “Truppe Fledermaus,” the animals for whom the Truppe once exclusively performed, are now shown as dripping and battered taxidermy specimens clutched or floating as talismans from a world adrift; transmuted perhaps into a meditative Buddhist bardo state. With eyes closed, as if in death or a transcendent state of surrender – or with eyes open, as if in attention or wonderment or shock – the reposed Truppe figures are surrounded by the ruined material objects of their lives such as musical instruments, poetry books, luggage and various curiosities such as toy ships, porcelain doll appendages and the surrounding masses of botanical specimens. Kahn + Selesnick’s arched-top photographs offer a reverent view of these solitary figures. Contained in black and white or vivid saturated hues, the contoured images hint at a kind of stained-glass window effect with their presence – not as a reflection of religious figures per say, but as a weighted arena in which the sacred, devotional or seductive is expressed amidst a disordered nature-gone-wrong environment. The photographs teem with plentitude of a different sort – an impending danger such as the colorful toxic mushrooms or the series’ winged doomed portent: a bat with white-nose bat fungus. And yet, a potentiality seems to simultaneously exist within the series with its lavish and lush vibrant greenery and flowers in full bloom. The artists’ hopeful and colorful apricot-laden branches, open blossoms and fresh fennel bulbs call attention to an irrevocable positive impulse just beneath the surface – even as humankind increasingly renders the planet unlivable. Further layered within the photographs is the image of a mare’s pelvis. Its symbol of the life-bearing female form perhaps poetically suggests that an opportunity for rebirth remains if humankind fully awakens to the reality of a world of watery ruins.

Equally beautiful and nightmarish, the floating dream states of Kahn + Selesnick inspire deeply imaginative, if cautionary, contemplation. Their surreal worlds offer both peculiarly conscious and alarmingly prescient views of the natural world where the fury unleashed by human endeavor looms large. As each photograph tells its layered story, the viewer is encouraged to subsequently retell and further embellish upon its range of meanings, enabling a deeper continuing and personal revelation. As with all of the artists’ extensive series such as “City of Salt” and “Eisbergfreistadt,” the works thrive somewhere between grand fiction and fact. Kahn + Selesnick’s malleable and at times seemingly prophetic offerings call the engaged viewer toward seeking a higher interpretation as the artists’ distinctive and influential expression consistently speaks to not only what is universal in the world, but aspirational, as well.

Graduates of Washington University at St. Louis, Kahn + Selesnick have been awarded artist residencies at Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; the Djerrasi Artist Program, Woodside, California; and Toni Morrison’s Atelier Program at Princeton University, New Jersey. Their work has been shown in more than eighty solo exhibitions throughout the US and Belgium and in group exhibitions in China, France, Germany Monaco, and Norway. Museum Exhibitions include: Brooklyn Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography and Field Museum, Overbeck-Gesellschaft, Lübeck, Germany and Cape Cod Museum of Art. Their work is in the permanent collections of the LA County Museum of Art, Boston Public Library, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fogg Museum of Art, National Portrait Gallery, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Their latest commissioned series, “Mars Revisited,” features and uncanny resemblance between certain terrestrial terrains and Martian topographies joined by the artists for staged, fictionalized alien encounters was most recently on view at the Boise Art Museum.

Kim Dickey
Claustrum (Cloister)

Robischon Gallery is pleased to present its first extensive solo exhibition for Colorado artist Kim Dickey. Widely recognized for her assembled constructions of repeating glazed terracotta and stoneware elements, Dickey’s “Claustrum (Cloister)” invokes the architectural form of a medieval cloister sanctuary where a central garden was surrounded by walkways which incorporated sculptures atop columns. Compellingly, the word claustrum, Latin for cloister, is also a neuroscience term for the part of the cerebral cortex where some believe consciousness resides. By alluding to the inherent mystery of the cloister both in design and concept, Dickey’s newest series recalls a period that has passed or a memory that has been forgotten while acknowledging the illusive nature of consciousness itself.

Dickey’s signature architectural topiaries sheathed in variously-hued greens in quatrefoil shapes are evocative of both the cultured or trimmed garden hedgerows as well as minimalist forms in art. The geometric forms define the gallery space while holding an expression of an exterior/interior investigation in reference to the cloister. The artist developed her signature approach to her exhibited architectural forms in response to a 1964 NYC Green Gallery exhibition by noted Minimalist artist Robert Morris. With intent, Dickey referenced the abstracted forms of Morris’ L Beams and I Beams, as an acknowledgement of sculpture as it acts as a prop within the staging of a constructed architectural installation experience. Dickey’s Morris-inspired sculptures respect the forms in dialogue, while her extravagant approach toward her surfaces challenge the viewers’ perception in a decidedly different, more overtly-felt manner.

The context of the architectural space created within the exhibition by the bold, Minimalist referencing forms, allow for Dickey’s sculptural animal inhabitants to reveal themselves to the viewer in a variety of ways. From intricately layered, white glazed stoneware to elaborate foliate-covered surfaces, Dickey’s creatures stand either in procession or in the case of the green-leafed animals, are deftly concealed nearby. The artist’s inherently refined sense of order, expressed with her precisely placed, layered individual ceramic leaves, also cloak or dress each animal – as many are presented, such as the noble stag, located atop a formal, stylized white pedestal reminiscent of medieval columns. Each white creature in procession proudly communicates its appointed virtue, while Dickey’s green-leafed animals seem as if bewitched or possessing the magic to bewitch once their gaze is met. Uniting fauna and flora both, the small and medium green-shrub forms conceal the enchanted hidden animals within – a fox, owl, or bear, as a suggestion that things might not be all as they appear, or even, are hiding in plain sight while the observers become the observed. Pivotal, and at the center of the exhibition, stands a ghostlike outthrust human arm with a shaped green laurel wreath in its grasp. This strategically placed sculpture acts as a pivot point – a symbol of victory amidst the allegorical virtues of the stately animals – as if to reaffirm the presence of an ever-flawed, yet ever-hopeful striving humanity.

All of Dickey’s sculptures consider the ornate and instructive figures that adorned cloisters and once served as cautionary iconography to warn the monks of human flaws and foibles lest they succumb to temptation as they freely communed within the garden space. The artist states, “My animals represent certain qualities such as fidelity, endurance and timeliness. And yet, for every assigned attribute, the meaning flips. It is something I perceive in the way these animals are employed in heraldic imagery and their attendant family mottos. While presenting themselves as moral champions, conversely the animals also embody the falseness or hubris of any claim to character strength. In other words, there is fallibility – vulnerability as exemplified by the porcupine – and that message is latently embedded in these images. As humans, our strength lies in this reminder of imperfection, in our humility and our consciousness of this fact.”

Concluding Dickey’s exhibition is a small box sculpture that concisely expresses her keen sense of theoretical discourse across time. Quatrefoil covered in her unique and personal style, the box is paying homage to Robert Morris’, Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, a work that featured an audio of sawing and hammering. Dickey’s piece entitled Grotto (Box with the Sound of Its Own Making) also emits its own studio audio – the kneading of clay; the spritzing of a water bottle along with the sound of bird calls and musical phrases. This final offering in the exhibition is a fitting expression of Kim Dickey’s complex creative search, conceptual impetus, theatrical sense of space and her abiding reverence for the natural world.

A long-time professor at the University of Colorado, Kim Dickey has a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Dickey’s work is included in the permanent collection of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, the Colorado Collection, University of Colorado, Boulder, Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY, Greenwich House Pottery, New York, NY, Guldagergaard International Art Center, Skaelskor, Denmark, John Michael Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI, Museum of Contemporary Art, Honolulu, HI, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX and Slagelse Radhus, Denmark along with work in the collection of Mark and Polly Addison and additional private and corporate collections and exhibitions at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA and Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, the Museum of Arts and Design, NY and the Denver Botanic Gardens. Kim Dickey has been the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships and awards including; a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY, a Eugene Kayden Award, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, Provost Faculty Achievement Award, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, John Michael Kohler Arts and Industry Fellowship, Sheboygan, WI and she has been an artist in residence at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Maine, Guldagergaard International Residency Center, Skaelskor, Denmark, Corinth Ceramics Studio, Los Angeles, CA, a year-long resident at California State University, Long Beach. Additionally, the artist wishes to thank the University of Colorado’s GCAH (Graduate Committee on the Arts and Humanities) for a generous research grant which in part supported this exhibition.

William Lamson
In the Roaring Garden

Robischon Gallery is pleased to present the latest work and fifth solo exhibition by New York artist William Lamson. The previously exhibited notable works such as Lamson’s “A Line Describing the Sun,” “Action for the Paiva,” as well as the “Hydrologies” series have all distinguished the artist through their wide-ranging contemplative, every-man stance. William Lamson’s latest video entitled In the Roaring Garden furthers the dialogue as an experimental work ingeniously created to re-envision Henry David Thoreau’s iconic cabin and watery landscape. Employing a floating camera obscura – a box or room that serves as an optical device where light passes through an opening to illuminate an interior surface as it projects an exterior image, upside-down in color and in perspective – Lamson’s camera obscura takes the shape of an 8 x 8 foot floating, cabin-shaped tent. No ordinary forest dwelling, this is a 1:5 scale model of the 19th C American transcendentalist Thoreau’s one-room retreat at Walden Pond in Massachusetts. For In the Roaring Garden, Lamson filmed the camera obscura’s projections of the lake’s landscape as the moving images shone into the cabin, cycling through the daily rhythms on the water. Illuminating a white, three-dimensional interior filled with created laser-cut objects and translucent Plexiglas furniture, Lamson filmed the mesmerizing sparkling sunlight reflected off water, meditative clouds and swaying green trees as they crept across the interior all to the sound of lapping waves, rushing water and birdsong. The reclusive writer’s space, reimagined as an artist’s minimalist studio complete with a work table, tools, a writing desk, bed and chair, places the viewer inside a kind of sacred site of potentiality and creation. A rock-as-paperweight symbolically anchors a blank page as if to await a writer’s or an artist’s mark within the perpetually evolving light and shadowed work space. Over the course of the eighteen-minute video inside this innovative cinematic environment, the light animates the monochromatic objects through predetermined wall openings, highlighting even dust motes within beams of light as time seems elusive within the enclosure despite the rising and setting of the glowing sun. Lamson, ever willing to align in tandem with unpredictable natural forces, whether it be in a blazing desert with wind-whipped sand or riding turbulent river currents as he has endured in the making of previous work, the artist’s union with the gentler elements of the Walden Pond theme link him to Thoreau’s timeless naturalism, as he contemporizes both simple and refined technologies to produce an expressive and original experiential work. As in all of William Lamson’s series, his subjects spark an awakening to the world and the recognition of the beauty and the power within it to further invoke reverence and imagination.

A 2014 recipient of a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, William Lamson has an MFA from Bard College and a BA from Dartmouth College. His work has been shown widely throughout the US and Europe including the Brooklyn Museum, MOMA PS1, Kunsthalle Erfut, Moscow Biennial, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver and many others. He has created site-specific installations for the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Storm King Art Center, Indianapolis Museum of Art and the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. His work is in permanent museum collections including Brooklyn Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and numerous private collections. A MacDowell Fellow, he has also received honors from Shifting Foundation and the Experimental Television Center.