TWINART
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TwinArt’s
Instant Replay series produced between 1987 and 1993, on
view at the Frank Pictures Gallery in Santa Monica this
spring, confirms Polaroid founder Edwin H. Land's conviction
that artists would be the ones to lead in the development
of photographic technology. Land, who had hired Ansel Adams
to freely work with the first "instant" Polaroid
camera he produced in 1948, set up a program in the 1970s
to encourage artists to explore the creative potential
of his instant cameras – simultaneously sponsoring
innovation in the new medium and building a unique corporate
art collection. Along with Chuck Close, David Hockney,
William Wegman, and Ellen Carey, Ellen and Lynda Kahn were
among the artists sponsored by Polaroid to work with the
large-format 20x24 instant camera Edwin Land developed
in 1977. As part of Polaroid's Artist Support program,
TwinArt was invited to the now legendary 20x24 Studio in
Boston. Their first 20x24 photographs juxtaposed brand-name
products like Hostess Twinkies and Nestlé's Quick
with eclectic props and ephemera including religious icons,
miniature robots, electric light bulbs, and exotic food
packaging. Where the hyper-real images of products and
stereotypes collided, the perfect world they advertised
was challenged, and ironies emerged.
The
following year, TwinArt was again invited by Polaroid to
the new 20x24 Studio in Soho, New York. The result was
their Instant Replay series, which exposed the dream of
the effortless, "instant" life as a mirage mirrored
in the parallel and reciprocal realms of advertising and
consumerism. The unique Polaroid prints TwinArt produced
during this period exposed the contradiction between glossy
and lushly color-saturated photography (one of the commercial
purposes that drove the 20x24 camera's invention) and the
grainy look of video TwinArt had been exploiting since
the 1970s. The complex images in this series combined figures
from different professions and lifestyles as well as actors
selling products like shampoo and lipstick and dwelled
on the packaging for household cleaning products. Nuanced
media messages were remixed to give the pop sensibility
a critical edge. Devo’s hit song It’s a Beautiful
World could have been the soundtrack for this body of work
in which TwinArt recycled video clips captured as freeze
frames, superimposing them with fragments of print ads.
Today,
these vintage images have the feel of the "re-mix" avant
la lettre, as if – like David Bowie in Nicolas Roeg's
classic 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth – the
viewer were watching multiple TV channels at once. TwinArt's
20x24 Polaroids are an homage to French New Wave cinema,
and in particular to Godard, whose video experiments during
the 1970s were an inspiration to the Kahn sisters. Proffering
the commercial product as icon, Instant Replay also invokes
the work of Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brackage,
Bruce Connor. TwinArt's video works have been exhibited
at the Kitchen, Mudd Club, Franklin Furnace, and Anthology
Archive in New York, and at the 1986 Tokyo Video Biennale.
Privileged to have been selected three times by Polaroid
to participate in the Artist Support Program, Ellen and
Lynda Kahn were also awarded a National Endowment of the
Arts Fellowship in New Media in 1981. Their art work has
been exhibited internationally in museums and galleries,
including the Whitney Museum of American Art Image World
1990, the Metropolitan Museum of Art Pucci Love 1991, and
the Pompidou Center in Paris Instant This – Instant
That 1982, and is represented in the corporate art collections
of Absolut Vodka, Polaroid, Bell+Howell, and Best Products.
Today,
Emmy Award-winning Ellen and Lynda Kahn are still the creative
force of TwinArt, a bi-coastal company based in New York
City and Los Angeles which conceptualizes ideas, builds
brands and stylizes pop culture. With a focus on the visual
media – photography, film, video, and graphic design – their
work appears everywhere from film to broadcast television,
commercials, print ads, museums, and billboards. Together,
the dynamic duo has brought their artistic edge-sensibility
to projects for Absolut Vodka, Martini & Rossi, and
Polaroid, among others.
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