Acrylic paint on scarred canvas, mended with medical tape. 2012
Poster for pinkStardust – created by hand, as it would have been “back in the day”.
pinkStardust: my search for time and space says it all – I’m looking to secure an exhibition space and schedule the time the installation will be available for visiting. I am also searching for the curator who will work with me on the project. Someone as fascinated by this epoch of time as I am (the heyday of our atomic testing times).
As I continue the search for the time and place pinkStardust will exist as a completed installation, I continue to make the work. Future posts will be about the different components of the installation: objects, images, surfacing and lighting; the processes I am using; how the concepts for the installation express the overall content.
I am also working on the practical: how the installation will be transported to its exhibition space, and the development of the video that will market the installation (featuring The pinkStardust Blues). Blog posts will be mined for book content.
Some blog posts will include past works orbiting the three installations that make up My Manhattan Project (skin, exhibited in 2001, pinkStardust and concluding with NUMEC: Destroyer of Worlds). I call the orbiters ‘satellite’ pieces. They include installations, objects and imagery,
And finally, I am making The 32 Most Notorious Atomic Tests (a series of works inspired by Warhol’s series 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962) that will be auctioned off to fund materials and supplies for pinkStardust. Andy is a big part of pinkStardust both in content and inspiration so I will be talking more about him in future posts.
Prepared canvases, (16″ x 20″, the same size canvases Warhol used for his 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans series). Skinned with the back side of aluminum foil (a nod to the original Factory and a material that I am using in work for pinkSardust), coated in black acrylic paint, and awaiting the drawings of notorious atomic tests from the time frame that pinkStardust sits in – 1945 to the present with a focus on the 1960s.
The image taped behind the canvases, on my studio wall is a black & white copy of Trinity, the first ever atomic explosion. That first test will have two drawings representing the event – one at an earlier stage of explosion and this one of the mushroom cloud that developed.
I strongly desire to exhibit pinkStardust somewhere in the southwest, preferably close to the “dirt” where the events I am discussing in the installation took place, such as:
New Mexico. Los Alamos, the site of Trinity, the first atomic explosion that started it all, as well as one of the current locations for nuclear weapons testing, White Sands Proving Grounds.
Nevada. Las Vegas when it was known as the Atomic City because of the many above ground atomic tests that were conducted about 60 miles north – prompting ‘bomb parties’, family picnics, and other atomic tourism.
Los Angeles, where museums such as the Wende exhibit work about the Cold War.
Or, someplace out there that is looking for me too.
carlisle studio 
