Please join us on Saturday, April 16 from 3 -5 pm for the release of Stanya Kahn’s new artist book, “Die Laughing”. Stanya will be doing a reading (rated R!) at 3:30pm.

“Die Laughing” is an artist’s book of drawings Stanya Kahn created over the course of two years. Some were made for the book, some for exhibitions, some as sketches on the way to other works, and some almost made it into the trash.

Similarly to Kahn’s videos, this book offers threads of narrative without grand arcs, its story in part relying on the reader for activation in the alchemy of meeting within the more subconscious realm in which language is only a ghost. Doorways, trails, tunnels, walls, and wide-open undefined cosmic spaces offer accumulative momentum as well as discrete moments completing themselves on the page. For Kahn, the drawings often work in place of scripts, a form of writing in which time, space, the body and psyche grapple with immediacy and also with words as they function and fail. Worms, witches, women, snakes, rocks, turds, t-shirts and a couple of yetis—”Die Laughing”’s figures emerge from the conceptual core of Kahn’s practice: from the low place where you lie, confront the worst things first and crack jokes in the face of it. Through the cracks comes something else, maybe the things we need: new discourse, a break in the system, sharp tools, salve and the unknown.

“Die Laughing”

2nd Cannons Publications 030

2016, 1st printing, edition of 300, 8.75 x 6″, 170 pages