Stanya Kahn

The Pit is pleased to announce the opening of Heatstroke, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Stanya Kahn.

“Satire is tragedy plus time.”

-Lenny Bruce

This is a show of drawings and includes works on paper, canvas and digital animation. Some of the pieces are new, showing here for the first time. Some are from Kahn’s 2015 show Die Laughing at Marlborough Chelsea in New York and included in an artist’s book by the same name.

Kahn: “All of the works were made with a lot of pleasure despite various feelings of terror, grief and worry. El Niño never came, my mom died, the cops shot over 500 people. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Oops, no more icebergs. This is just the tip of death’s boney finger. The middle one.

Here’s one thing: Snakes only ever eat their own tails when they are having a severe anxiety attack due to heatstroke. The snakes eating their tails in these drawings aren’t spiritual symbols or references to the mystical “Ouroboros.” They are self-destructing in a hot panic. From ancient Egyptian, Greek, Indian, Norse and South American mythology to systems of thought in Alchemy and Yoga, the image of a snake eating it’s tail has been used to refer to the cyclical nature of life and death, to eternity and the infinite. Possibly the first to use the image symbolically, the Ancient Egyptians represented their funerary deity Mehen with an image of a snake, its tail in its mouth, embodying “the beginning and the end of time.” In other Egyptian sources the symbol represents “the formless disorder that surrounds the orderly world and is involved in that world's periodic renewal.”

This idea of a circling formless disorder seems to most closely reflect the wildness of anxiety, especially that which is brought on by a hostile environmental condition. There is first a quick association with the urgency of climate change. This June being the hottest month ever recorded, the planet is heating up exponentially. Here in California, the drought is so severe (and unrelenting, as we head toward what scientists are calling “epic drought” where the west will go for 40-50 years with no moisture for the first time in recorded history), we’ll all soon be burning up, eating ourselves out of panic, behaving in dangerously irrational ways due to thirst and heat (where thirst might already manifest in skyrocketing fees for water sold by corporate monopolies buying up huge tracts of land sitting on aquifers + soaring unaffordable energy costs to run over-taxed grids not able to output enough energy to cool our lifestyles.) Crises in migration across borders to the north will resemble those underway now across the Mediterranean and Europe, with equal parts fear and irrationality, border fanaticism and rash Brexit-style secession moves. One can picture Oregonians armed and coffee-ed up in their Patagonia down parkas and locally grown leather hiking boots, defending the rim of once rain-soaked-but-now-just-damp forests from parched Californians trying to crawl across the border in shorts and faded tank tops: “Life’s a Beach.”

In a broader read, one could make associations with the unregulated heat of citizen disempowerment in a system seemingly air-locked with no cross-stream. The American state, as it continues to serve corporate interests over human interest in every aspect of its infrastructure, from social welfare to hyper-militarization world-wide and at home, is boiling people alive. And now, in a stifling two-party lockdown, a fascist is running against a war-hawk. It’s getting hot in here. Tail in mouth, we are eating the wrong thing.

This line of thinking can be applied to reading most of the show.

Stanya Kahn is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in video with a practice that includes drawing, writing, performance and sound. Humor, pathos and the uncanny emerge as central modes in a hybrid media practice that seeks to re-work relationships between fiction and document, the real and the hyper-real, satire and sincerity, narrative time and the synchronic time of impulse. In a long-term investigation of how rhetoric gains and loses power, Kahn’s projects often situate language in the foreground of works that are dialectically driven by the demands of the body, looking for agency from deep inside distress.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Marlborough Chelsea (NY), Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Pigna Project (Rome), The New Museum (NY), Grand Arts (KC,MO), Galleria Perdida/Recess (NY) and a survey of works from 2008-2012 at Cornerhouse (UK). Her 2014 experimental narrative feature Don’t Go Back to Sleep, had a New York premiere Brooklyn Academy of Music with Migrating Forms Festival; UK premiere at Cornerhouse. Her work has shown at MOCA/SD; in The California Biennial (‘10); Fernley Astrup (Oslo); Rodeo Gallery (London/Istanbul); Future Gallery (Berlin) among others. Kahn’s collaborative works with Harry Dodge have shown at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, the Hammer Museum, Sundance Film Festival, the Whitney Biennial (‘08), MOCA/LA, PS1, and MoMA/NY among others. She was a contributing writer, actor and costumer for the feature film By Hook or By Crook with Dodge and Silas Howard. Recent publications include a monograph, It’s Cool, I’m Good (Cornerhouse) and Die Laughing (2nd Cannons) and contributions to the anthologies Abstract Video (ed. Gabrielle Jennings, UC Press) and Moving Image (ed. Omar Kholeif, Whitechapel). Kahn won a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow in Film/Video among other grants and fellowships. Her work is in the collections of MoMA/NY; the Hammer Museum/LA; the Goetz Collection in addition to private collections.