Mission accomplished for ‘Apollo Prophecies’

Hilarious. Deliciously absurd. Wondrous. Enchanting. Kahn and Selesnick are back.

“The Apollo Prophecies,” their latest photo-text epic, follows up admirably on the duo’s previous, equally absorbing shows at Paul Kopeikin Gallery -- “City of Salt” in 2002 and “The Circular River” in 1999. The New York-born Nicholas Kahn and the London-born Richard Selesnick have worked as a team for about 15 years now, billing themselves by last name only, headlining with the concentrated punch of Barnum & Bailey.

Kahn and Selesnick, too, are showmen of a sort. Their work is highly theatrical. They perform tableaux, complete with costumes, props and scenery, which they photograph, print meticulously (sometimes in a faux-historical manner), exhibit and publish. At heart, they are storytellers, practicing an art that defies obsolescence.

“The Apollo Prophecies” reads (visually and verbally) like a parable. It weaves together familiar names from the history of space exploration with fabricated events and fantastic scenarios. The artists recast the race to space of the 1950s and 1960s as one chapter in a tale that began more than a century earlier, with a mission that left its members stranded on the moon.

In Kahn and Selesnick’s panoramic photographs, astronauts from the two eras encounter each other on the crusty, cratered lunar surface. Some are wearing familiar NASA-style spacesuits, and others are in long, dark fur coats, heavy boots and leather gloves.

The coexistence of these figures from different times, in such an unlikely locale, is characteristic of the artists’ curiously seductive work. They revel in the friction between compelling story and incredible circumstance. The threads running through their stories stretch back to ancient myth and wind around the globe, attesting to the commonality of human ambition and the will toward exploration. The work is entertaining and has conceptual heft -- no easy balancing act.

The artists launch the sequence of photographs in “The Apollo Prophecies” with, appropriately, an image of liftoff. The panoramic format itself suggests a span of time, and Kahn and Selesnick exploit it well, often staging multiple scenes (using the same characters) within a single print.

The practice occurs in art from Japan, the early Renaissance and elsewhere, and it reinforces a sense of time as fluid, its narrative lines crisscrossing and doubling back on themselves. On the left side of that first print, a rocket blasts off on a billowing cloud of smoke. It appears again toward the right side of the image, jetting across the sky horizontally. Observers on the marshy landscape use antiquated devices -- a telescope of graduated boxes, an enhanced ear trumpet -- to monitor the flight.

In the succeeding prints, the astronauts engage in activities both conventional -- collecting specimens with shovels and buckets -- and bizarre, parading across the landscape with a metal-clad elephant. In “Crash Landing,” the final image, the module parachutes back to Earth, and at the far right side the dimpled moon floats like a memory.

Kahn and Selesnick stage these scenes with panache and deadpan humor. In both the liftoff and landing images, the curve of the Earth, normally unnoticeable, forms a gentle arc from edge to edge of the print. The astronauts of yore wear beaked glass helmets with what appears to be an internal filtering device for breathing the foreign atmosphere. Such details bring the visual story to life and keep it balanced on that fine point between a truth we recognize and one we imagine.

The images are not just primary but entirely self-sufficient. The accompanying text, overloaded with idioms of sacred prophecy (“all the lands fruited”), has clever moments, but is dragged down by tedium and pretense.

Kahn and Selesnick present a few props in the show, but what plays off the panoramas best is a wall full of smaller prints that suggest notes from the expedition. Some take the form of taxonomic studies, documents of tools and moon rocks, perhaps. A few studio-type portraits of astronauts are interspersed, as are diagrams and even a page of breathless Blakean poetry.

For all of their love of the 19th century, its spirit of exploration and analog tools of science, Kahn and Selesnick are artists of the 21st century, well-versed in Postmodern pastiche. Thanks to its deft mix of nostalgia, fantasy, inquiry and wonder, their work exerts a strong gravitational pull.

Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 937-0765, through Feb. 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Finding grace amid their simplicity

It’s not always obvious that the interiors photographed by Mayumi Terada are miniature constructions. They don’t announce themselves as sculpture any more than any other pared environment might. It’s not even of primary importance, really, that the spaces are dollhouse-sized, crafted of balsa wood, cloth, Styrofoam and clay. What matters in these beautiful, enveloping images is their purity and stillness.

Each black-and-white print at White Room depicts an interior space distilled to its essence: wall, floor, door, light and shadow. Furnishings are spare -- a bed, a couch, a sink and little more. A pronounced sense of absence emerges from evidence of recent presence, such as a chair pulled out or the depression left on a pillow. These environments are profoundly quiet, graced by meditational calm.

In one image, light pours languidly over a casually made bed, draping itself over the covers like a body at rest. In another, two suitcases sit on the floor, white as the walls that surround them, heavy mute objects whose seams rise like scars.

“Kitchen Sink” reads like a concise poem on the classic theme (think Vermeer, especially) of interior and exterior space converging, contrasting. We viewers are in the position of one inside, looking out.

A sink is cut out from the countertop but has no fixtures. Next to the opening, a glossy puddle of water sits on the counter like a displaced lake. The window just beyond the sink opens low and wide, a thick slit with a simple, rippling white curtain. The window -- the beyond -- is all light and promise, a vivid counterpoint to the bleak accident on the counter below.

Terada, born and schooled in Japan, has lived in New York for the last few years. She works in a vein mined by James Casebere, Thomas Demand and others who photograph constructed interiors, but with a sure sense of her own vision, stripped of gimmickry and excess. Each of her images is both a Minimal sculpture and a moment of grace.

White Room Gallery, 8810 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 859-2402, through Feb. 12. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Pride, humiliation go side by side

Norman Yonemoto, an accomplished maker of films, videos and installations (most in collaboration with his brother, Bruce), channels Joseph Cornell in his solo show at LMAN Gallery, but not very deftly. The show peaks early with the first work seen upon entering, then drags to an uninspired finish.

“Christmas Greetings From Tule Lake ca 1944” is a box construction -- a wall-mounted, glass-fronted case filled with objects of personal and metaphorical significance. The box, framed in gray wood slats and lined with tar paper, gives textural palpability to several of the photographs within, showing scenes from the Japanese internment camp the artist’s family was sent to during the war.

Christmas ornaments hang from a barbed wire model of DNA, and illuminated Christmas lights cast a sprightly glow over all. In this three-dimensional, unusually intimate page from a family album, images of pride neighbor others of humiliation, and the paraphernalia of celebration gleam perversely over references to pain, loss and injustice.

Yonemoto’s other box assemblages also gather personal mementos, clocks and objects such as nautilus shells that resonate with his fascination with time and creation. A few pieces incorporate images of masturbation, documented using the stop-action methods of Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic motion studies.

Many of the elements in the works are richly associative, but instead of being woven together synergistically, they’re assembled like little inventories, which mutes their power. Yonemoto has plenty of material skill, personal history and artistic nuance to draw from. His earlier work attests to it, but this show gives only the merest of hints.

LMAN Gallery, 949 Chung King Road, (213) 628-3883, through Feb. 12. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.

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Failing to test any boundaries

In his first L.A. show, at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Houston-based Scott Calhoun displays a knowing degree of artistic correctness, the aesthetic equivalent of PC. Thankfully his work is well-executed and a pleasure to look at, even if its strategies feel predictable.

Key among these is the appropriation of other art -- in Calhoun’s case, Victorian-era illustration and Japanese woodblock prints. That mix-and-match visual sensibility often results, as here, in a disjunctive sense of scale and time.

In Calhoun’s images of women among flora and fauna, butterflies have tiny ukiyo-e heads, and the immediacy of his handwork consorts with the more remote nostalgia of old illustrations and photographs collaged to the surface. The surfaces of the paintings, especially, flaunt the resulting ambiguity; forms painted with vividness are intermixed with areas of muted, faded splendor.

There’s a playfulness to Calhoun’s approach that’s refreshing and helps stave off the air of self-importance that typically attends such artistically correct work. The drawings, in sepia ink and white gouache, are particularly lyrical. Dreamy and fantastic, they manage to be fresh even as they’re partially recycled.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5795 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 933-2117, through Feb. 8. Closed Sunday and Monday.