The Apollo Prophecies depicts, in one extravagantly long tritone panorama, an
imagined expedition of 1960s American astronauts who land on the moon
and discover a lost mission of Edwardian-era astronauts who greet them as
long-awaited gods. These wildly inventive staged photographs, evidence of
events that never happened, playfully question the role of photography in our
sense of historical truth. Equal parts Jules Verne and Stanley Kubrick, with a
touch of William Blake, the panoramic moonscape literally unfolds in multiple
episodes that intermingle artifacts from the fearless era of early-twentieth-century
exploration with space-age gadgetry. Kahn and Selesnick have combined
real-life locations, miniature models and full-scale props of their own
devising to produce a dramatic narrative where space-suited astronauts (most
portrayed by the artists themselves, with a few similarly clad monkeys and elephants)
reappear as events continue across the page. This is an Apollo lunar
mission at once dreamlike, oddly familiar and utterly convincing. Its ingenious
package includes the 19-foot-long two-sided panorama (58 pages when folded)
and a 12-page booklet whose mind-bending narrative is illustrated with
four-color mixed-media drawings.
About the Limited Edition:
The limited edition, available in a print run of 250 copies, includes a signed
and numbered
lenticular image (viewed from one
angle, it reveals an astronaut from the Edwardian era; from the other an astronaut
from the 60s) and a 20-minute DVD documenting the lunar mission.
