The image above is a detail of a ‘reminder’ piece that I made in 2018 while journeying toward exhibiting pinkStardust. The worn velvet fabric was ripped off of the 2 ton boulder that sat in Zen Garden in ‘skin’ (more about ‘skin’, the first of 3 installations in my series My Manhattan Project, in previous blog entries). I drew an atomic explosion, abstracted, on the fragment with graphite and white chalk, added a white pedestal with a cone of pink sand poured onto the middle of it, and exhibited it in the hallway in front of my studio.
Below are two images of the boulder as they now sit in front of the Loveland Museum/Gallery where ‘skin’ was exhibited. The detail on the right shows that most of the original skin, the creamy white velvet, has been shed – leaving the stone to show as it originally existed before I altered it.
Reminder / remembering
Since Nolan’s film Oppenheimer was released this past summer there has been a lot of social media about all things atomic – including interviews with many who have been both directly, and indirectly, affected by all things nuclear. That’s one of the great things about art. It can bring important information to our attention. We need to know these things. We need to remember – to find out what happened.
pinkStardust has been with me since 2012, slowly picking up speed as things like earning a living, family difficulties, creating other bodies of work, participating in other exhibitions and other just life living kept the pace a bit slower than I would have liked.
Reminders, like the studio piece that began this posting, kept pinkStardust a visceral experience for me, both while the research for and development of the installation continued, and while I was focused on other bodies of work like The World Wide Water Project.
But now, now we are accelerating quickly toward exhibition time because the organization of the timeline that forms the structure of the installation is finally complete. That means that I can now finish up both the design placement and making the forms themselves that mark important events on the time line – like Spade Foot Sacrifice that marks the Trinity test or The Four Enola Geishas that mark the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I can also finish making images that mark important events within the timeline, like Atomic Angel and Buddha’s Feet. I can complete the design and pattern making for The Peace Mandala. And I can finish collecting the found objects that will be included in pieces like Picnic (working title) and Duck and Cover Altar and order surfacing materials, like pink sand and pink bingo chips. I can complete it all – ready all the elements needed to build the installation in her exhibition space.
If I did need a reminder of why I have been working on pinkStardust for 11 years, pushing her toward exhibition, painting The 32 Most Notorious Tests would certainly do it. As I study black and white copies of photographs taken of the many nuclear test conducted between 1945 and 1963 the insanity of those testing times is evident.
I wrote a song early in the development of pinkStardust, The pinkStardust Blues, as an abbreviated introduction to the installation. The last verse of the song says “History repeats itself, it happens all the time…”. Yes, when we don’t remember what we did, and especially why did it, we are doomed to do it again, and again, and again, no? To make the same damaging mistakes over and over and over…
Next posting I will talk about the making of The pinkStardust Blues music video, which I am hoping will be shot and ready for editing before the snow flies. Tick, tick, tick!
carlisle studio 