Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn

Masters of None

Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn’s video, Masters of None, evokes both laughter and unease as a sometimes choreographed, sometimes improvised post-apocalyptic family lives out life before us. Nameless, masked and unified by pink hoods, they speak to each other in a scrambled digital tongue. The clan mimic the everyday actions of the human animal: eating, grooming, wandering and working. Their personalities and plot are only revealed through tender, absurd and abstract comedy. Dodge and Kahn employ video and performance to illuminate the unquantifiable nature of humans and their environment.

Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn were both born in California and currently live and work in Los Angeles. They were recently included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), California Video at the Getty Center, and Eden’s Edge at The Hammer Museum (CA). Their video, film and performance work have been exhibited extensively, both nationally and internationally, including ZKM Karlsruhe (Germany), Art in General (NY), P.S. 1 Contemporary Art (NY), MOCA (CA), Stromereien Festival (Zurich), Sundance Film Festival (UT) and Diverseworks (TX). The artists are currently represented by the Elizabeth Dee Gallery (NY).

See Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Friday, September 12, at the back room.

www.elizabethdeegallery.com

If comedy in contemporary art seldom appears without qualifiers like deadpan, concrete, or conceptual, Dodge and Kahn’s shared comic sensibility belongs to its own idiosyncratic genre, closer in tone and caliber to the artists’ cited influences (Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin, and Lenny Bruce) than to the art world’s sight gag or idea-based sorts of humor. Rachel Kushner, Artforum