Kahn and Selesnick's old, new, borrowed blue
*Tyler Hubby
I wanted to extract from our correspondence, since Nicholas' words and thoughtfulness are so much a part of his art. These pieces of jewelry were borrowed and returned and had symbolic value for the couple; Nicholas made reliquaries for them to temporarily rest. When the mementos were returned, their resting places became even more meaningful; their memory filled the spaces like the dent in a pillow or a scent of a person after they've left a bed.
This is from Nicholas early on in the project: "I ordered a 1869 copy of ‘the science of new life’ a book on marriage that I will probably attack and use as the container of one of our new martian photos about love and bonding. Its filled with wonderful advice for both the wedding and afterwards."
A couple of other quotes: "I like the way certain books have carved out holes for precious objects and family heirlooms. I was interested in defacing the book’s victorian ideas about marriage using your family treasures and inserting the future of love and the intertwined martian couple in white bound into the book. My hopes were to dye the pages of the book blue without destroying it, so that may take some engineering. It will be a Kahn + Selesnick collaboration, just one that is more from Kahn because of my long standing friendship and sympathies toward Ms. Hubby and her exceptional Art."
"Something borrowed something blue" is a Victorian manual for marriage, painted blue, carved into a case for the bride’s borrowed jewels and sitting upon the groom’s blue sandbag from his filmmaking work, encases a new photo from Kahn & Selesnick from Mars in the future, of two people joined back to back by a tangle of connections."
www.kahnselesnick.com