Yesterday’s Tomorrows

Chris Otchy

Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick have a track record of creating bizarre, imaginary historical scenes through their uniquely art-directed drawings and panoramic photos. Their 2004 show The Apollo Prophecies re-imagined 1960s moonscapes skewed through a Cabinet of Dr. Caligari lens to great effect. Eisbergfreistadt (Iceberg Free State), their third show at New York’s Yancy Richardson Gallery follows this tradition, using the past as a launch pad for exploring a new and erratic realm of reality.

The exhibition was inspired by an actual event that occurred in 1923, when a gargantuan iceberg ran aground the port city of Lubeck, Germany. The show’s photographs, paintings, and fabricated artifacts reenact the imagined rise of a utopian principality on the iceberg, taking as its visual cue the notgeld or “emergency money” printed in Germany during that period, when war efforts commandeered the metal previously designated for coinage. Blending fact and fiction in ways only art can, Eisbergfreistadt challenges the truth of documentary evidence and highlights the mutable nature of history.

Eisbergfreistadt runs until July 3, 2008 at the Yancy Richardson Gallery, 535 W. 22nd St, New York City.