AJ Kahn

As It Stands is pleased to present Lost Horizon 2, a solo exhibition by painter AJ Kahn.

Titled as a sequel to the 1937 film in which the survivors of a plane crash in the Himalayas discover the lost utopia of Shangri-La, AJ Kahn’s Lost Horizon 2 suggests the possibility of a renewed experience of beauty amidst the wreckage of an aimless culture.

The sculpture at the center of the exhibition is a mountain-side town in miniature, set in a spatial configuration around which all of Kahn’s paintings orbit. Adorned in images of sketches, prints and paintings from AJ’s sketchbook, the buildings' facades are appropriated from disparate sources, images from underground rave flyers, the cover of a Van Gogh biography, clip art, outdated car advertisements, stock screensavers, and so on. It’s a model for an aberrant utopia in which art and life are identical. But it is a crooked fantasy, a city of illusions in which surface and substance have been divorced.

Pop art’s modus operandi was to enfold contemporary popular culture into fine art. In Kahn’s twist, popular culture cannot be adequately articulated by monolithic symbols like Marylin Monroe, but must be represented by an endless multitude of diffuse subcultural artifacts: online flotsam, underground music ephemera, advertisements for sports cars. The result is a nebulous texture of styles—each lacking value or directionality in isolation—combining with new contexts to suggest something beyond themselves: content becomes form becomes content once more. Here too Kahn has squared the circle of contemporary culture.

The appropriative apparatus of Kahn’s imagery, together with the irreverent, pathos-driven spirit of his style lays the foundation for his artwork. Both imply the navigation of a cultural minefield. Both are mobilized to make it—if not unscathed, at least undefeated—over the lost horizon.

—Grant Edward Tyler