Melissa Ichiuji:
Nasty Nice
New Sculptures

&

Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick
The Apollo Prophecies: New Photographs
and New Aperture Press Book

January 13 - February 18
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 13, 6-8:00 pm

Reception and Book Signing with Kahn & Selesnick and Aperture Press:
Saturday, January 13, 2-4:00 pm

Irvine Contemporary is pleased to present two concurrent solo exhibitions opening Saturday, January 13: Melissa Ichiuji, Nasty Nice, and Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick, New Photographs for the Apollo Prophecies. Irvine Contemporary and Aperture Press will also co-host a special reception and book signing with Kahn & Selesnick on Saturday, January 13, 2-4:00 pm to celebrate their new Aperture Press book of The Apollo Prophecies. The exhibitions will run through February 18, 2007.

Melissa Ichiuji: Nasty Nice
January 13 - February 18

Melissa Ichiuji creates doll-like sculptures that draw from surrealist traditions, but in a highly original form. She brings her background in dance and performance art to the creation of provocative sculptures that embody performances, drama, and rituals. Her compelling figures are staged fantasies about power, repressed sexuality, seduction, and violence, often at transition points from childhood innocence to sexual experience. Each sculpture is sewn and assembled from many materials, including fabric, leather, bones, fur, and nylon pantyhose.

Melissa Ichiuji's works resonate with the description of provocative art by novelist Don DeLillo:

Beauty is dangerous in narrow times, a knife in the slender neck of the rational man, and only those who live between the layers of these strange days can know its shape and name. (From Great Jones Street, 1973)

Melissa Ichiuji, The Optimists, 2006. Fabric, nylon stocking, mixed media. Dimensions variable.

Melissa Ichiuji graduated from the Corcoran College of Art and lives and works near Washington, DC. She was selected for Irvine Contemporary's Introductions 2 show in August 2006, and was featured in Irvine's exhibition at the Aqua Miami Art Fair during ArtBasel Miami week in December, 2006. Her work has recently been acquired for private collections in New York, Belgium, and Washington, DC. A sculpture by Melissa Ichiuji has been selected by Molly Donovan, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Art, for an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in August 2007.

Read the Interview with Melissa Ichiuji in NYArts Magazine (January, 2007)

Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick
The Apollo Prophecies: New Photographs
and Aperture Press Book
January 13 - February 18

Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick return to Irvine Contemporary for an exhibition of new panoramic photographs for their acclaimed Apollo Prophecies series. The original series of photographs and installations for The Apollo Prophecies have been widely exhibited, including a solo exhibition at Irvine in September 2005. The new photographs add to the opening narrative of the first launch and flight to the moon by the fictional historical Edwardian-era explorers, whose lunar village was discovered by Apollo-era US astronauts in The Apollo Prophecies narrative.

In one long, quadtone panorama, separable into individual 72 or 84 inch panorama photographs, the Apollo Prophecies presents a documentation of an imagined expedition of 1960s American astronauts. Landing on the moon, they discover a lost mission of Edwardian-era astronauts who greet them as long-awaited gods. By presenting wildly inventive and thoroughly convincing staged photographs as evidence of events that never happened, the Apollo Prophecies playfully questions historical representation and the accepted truth conventions of documentaries. Part Jules Verne, part Stanley Kubrick, the panoramic moonscape unfolds in multiple episodes that intermingle artifacts from the fearless era of early-20th-century exploration with space age technology and artifacts from the 1960s Apollo-era moon missions.

Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick, Launch, 2006, Quad tone archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle paper, 10 X 72 in.
1 of 3 new photographs for The Apollo Prophecies series. Edition of 10.

The artists now also celebrate their third Aperture Press book with the publication of both a limited artists' edition and a special panorama edition of The Apollo Prophecies. Aperture Press and Irvine Contemporary are jointly hosting a special reception and book signing with the artists on Saturday, February 13, 2-4 PM. The books will be available at the gallery during the exhibition.