For some two decades, Kahn/Selesnick have been concocting visual poems of the almost-possible: images of Edwardian lunar expeditions ("The Apollo Prophecies") , a lost Central Asian metropolis ("City of Salt") , post-apocalyptic life in a Caledonian fen ("Scotlandfuturebog") . They specialize in a history that isn't so much counter-factual as para-factual: imaginary gardens with real zeppelins in them.
Usually, their images take the form of large-scale panoramic photographs. Yet they also utilize painting, film, and mixed-media. "Eisbergfreistadt," which runs at the Pepper Gallery through June 9, includes a pack of hand - painted playing cards; a man's size 40 jacket and woman's size 8 dress, both made of Eisber gfreistadt currency; and a wonderfully weathered wheelbarrow overflowing with same. Actually, Kahn/Selesnick prefer the term "notgeld. " "Notgeld" is a German word meaning "emergency money," referring to the currency printed up during periods of hyperinflation.
Kahn/Selesnick are distant kin to such other nostalgist-exotics as the cartoonist Glen Baxter, illustrator Bruce McCall , and painter Donald Evans who specialized in meticulously detailed sheets of postage stamps from countries of his own imagining.
Kahn/Selesnick would protest that Eisbergfreistadt is not entirely their own creation. A very large iceberg purportedly made its way across the Baltic in 1923 and ran aground in Lubeck , Germany. This immense ice floe proceeded to become (this is where Kahn/Selesnick's fancy takes over) its own sovereign entity. It presumably melted away -- the artists maintain a diplomatic reticence on the subject of outcome -- in the mists of Weimar -era hyperinflation.
Hyperinflation is only the most obvious of the many German cultural elements from the '20s Kahn/Selesnick draw on for "Eisbergfreistadt." They are as much cultural historians -- perhaps "connoisseurs" would be a better word or even "curators" -- as they are visual artists.
