Misha Kahn
CODEBREAKERS
© Misha Kahn.
Misha Kahn is a polymath who aspires to differentiate the concept of “process” from that of “building.” He says that the former can be anything, and it often does not relate to the construction of our physical realm, only the visual. In his eyes, building is largely taken for granted, only an irrelevant means to an end with arbitrary meaning. He describes it as a void. What does it then mean to build in a different way? What happens when making something is no longer inextricable from efficiency or visual language? It is not surprising that the son of a house builder and children’s book author would question his trade in this way, especially against the backdrop of the imaginative, transfigurative material remarkability that has defined his career.
However, Kahn has always loved the perfect attachment that combines one element of a work with another to enclose something just right, to use structure as form inventively. Going forward, he wants to answer the call of whether or not building something, at every step, could respond in reverie to our sense of being, the earth, our emotions, and the metaphysical. It is his rebuttal to the pressure of constantly having to innovate, to the criticism of using too many materials or using them in the wrong way. He says, “I want to make a language, a rich lexicon of methods that together fabricate a holis- tic landscape of the material world that is deeply human.”
B. 1989, Duluth, MN
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
CO723
Misha Kahn, Harvest Moon, 2023, New wool, polyester, nylon, and stainless steel. Courtesy of the artist and Friedman Benda, New York. Photography by Timothy Doyon.
HL2811
Misha Kahn, For Those Who Float, 2022, Plastic and paint. Courtesy of the artist and Friedman Benda, New York. Photography by Timothy Doyon.
DT540
Misha Kahn, Windswept, 2022, Stainless steel and glass. Courtesy of the artist and Friedman Benda, New York. Photography by Timothy Doyon.