I stopped by Brooklyn’s 3rd Ward last week for the opening of Selena Kimball’s “The New World,” a stunningly untraditional retelling of American history. Kimball, probably better known for her work on The dreaming Life of Leonora de la Cruz, is a visual artist fascinated with history and the wild, aiming to reveal thematic narratives which progress through the ages and continue still today. She produces series of collages, drawings, and reinterpretations of archival documents that both honor and poke fun at the undercurrents of history. For example, in the photo above, if you look closely on the right you can see several businessmen having a meeting atop a lynching tree. Delicious!

Though her work is made, literally, from historical documents, it isn’t fact. Then again, it isn’t quite fiction either: looking through “The New World,” you will find objects reshaped into something else, characters reimagined, events reordered. It is through this seeming din that Kimball’s narrative emerges. Time is restructured to align with theme, and theme progresses to spin a tale that, by its end, becomes all to familiar to us in the modern day. Pictures and more after the jump.

Talking with Kimball about her work was fascinating, in part because I’m a history geek myself but also because she’s just so emotionally juiced about her work. It is evident that she connects to her work on an extremely personal level, and hopefully, so does the viewer. The narrative is all about reconciling, Kimball says, “a weird buffer of nostalgia” between the modern-day “us” and the historical “them.” Archival photographs and other documents may give a glimpse into a world both like and unlike our own, but to her, there is something authoritarian and alien about them. These historical documents represent a world wholly unknown to us, to which we cannot input our experiences or perspectives, and so we are forced to accept what these documents tell us, at total face value. No wonder so many people have such a hard time connecting to history. But for Kimball, rather than being put off, this authoritarian stance serves as a provocation. Rather hilariously, and yet also movingly, she says: “I want to poke into them.”

Kimball’s ultimate goal is to bring history closer to us in such a way that we can finally overcome that emotional barrier in looking back at history by reinterpreting it in such a way that we can learn from, laugh at, and most importantly, identify with it. Because, Kimball argues, that as much as we might deny it, the strange thing about history is that it’s not so removed from us as we often believe. Rather, history repeats itself and repeats itself, and we forget we are a part of a much larger story that started well before we came around.

In addition to her thematic historical narratives, Kimball also has some gender-bending sketches on display. While they can’t quite be considered stories, they’re still definitely worth a look:

You can see her work on display permanently in cyberspace on her website, or until May 31st at 3rd Ward.