Author Archives: carlislestudio

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!

How My Manhattan Project (MMP), and the three installations that make up the Project, “showed up”.

The first. ‘skin’

Sometime in the late 1990s I was invited to create an installation in the main gallery of the Loveland Museum/Gallery in Loveland, Colorado by Dr. Janice Currier, curator of exhibitions for the museum.

No organizing theme was presented, no request for a particular kind of work, just an invitation. An expression of trust in my work by Dr. Currier and the LM/G for which I am forever grateful, as the invitation resulted in the first installation of MMP called ‘skin‘ – though, at the time MMP wasn’t even a twinkle in my eye.

The subject I was exploring in ‘skin’ arose during a soak in an old clawfoot tub that sat in our tiny bathroom, oddly located off the kitchen of our house in Loveland.

Antique Japanese woodblock prints

Soaking in a tub of hot water remains one of my very favorite things to do. Because it’s relaxing, yes. But, it turns out, it’s also stimulating, because that relaxation has allowed for what I now call downloads to happen – ideas, many times in fully formed pictures, appearing in my head, of artworks waiting patiently to be made.

This particular time I was quietly sitting in my tub, gazing at some gift card images of old Japanese woodblock prints that I had framed in cheap plexiglass boxes and hung on the wall.

The images were two scenes of young girls caught in rain showers, one of a geisha and her assistant, again, caught in a rain shower, and an image of three women in the bath. All lovey – and none having anything to do with anything atomic. Yet, as I gazed at them my mind went to wondering about how awful it must of have been for those who died, and more so lived through, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Four images of old Japanese woodblock prints. All created centuries ago in a country I knew little about, but were now strangely inspiring me while soaking in my tub – becoming the catalyst for my creating an installation called ‘skin‘.

In ‘skin’ I contrasted and compared events about our war with Imperial Japan (WWII) that ended in the dawning of our atomic age. It was about a war waged far into a future beyond the time the woodblock prints were originally created, yet, here they were, telling me what I needed to do.

“they sang before the dawn…”

Fast forward to 2012. Again I’m sitting in a clawfoot tub. Only this time it’s during the opening of the Love & Light Show in Loveland’s Feed & Grain building, in below freezing temperatures – a heating pad the only thing between me and frozen bones. As I sat in the tub greeting visitors to the exhibition, I was again gazing at images of the four gift cards from my bathroom – copies now tacked to a distant wall of this old building, softly lit, reminding me of their power to inspire.

Wrapped in my fake fur coat, sitting on a heating pad in the bottom of the clawfoot tub in the unheated Feed & Grain in Loveland, CO. I found the tub on site while scouting the building for the place I wanted to create the installation.

Two images of the clawfoot tub with piles of origami boxes, (a nod to the Japanese woodblock print images that inspired MMP), surrounding the tub. The boxes are stamped with images of Spade foot toads. The stamps were fluorescent green, referencing the Pearls of Trinity – globs of green glass created from sand after the Trinity test in ’45. Each box contained a pink tissue paper glitter star with a line of info from the pinkStardust Timeline written on it. Visitors to the installation were invited to take a box – the pile dwindling with each box removed.

A ‘satellite installation’ (a category I’ve created for work orbiting but not a part of pinkStardust), “they sang before the dawn…” was my response to something I found while researching for pinkStardust. It wasn’t much, Just two or three lines in a book about J.R. Oppenheimer.¹

The book was American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman (the one that inspired the current hit film Oppenheimer). In it the authors are interviewing Oppie’s brother Frank about his experiences on the night of July 16, 1945, while waiting for the Trinity test to begin.

Frank was located not many miles away from the test site, in a field office. He’s recalling the terrific rain storm that took place during the night before the test. He tells the authors that even without the noise of the storm he would not have been able to sleep that night because of the mighty racket going on. It seems the valley had filled up with frogs during the storm – their croaking echoing off the mountains, creating a terrific noise that could not be silenced.

Intrigued by Frank’s story about this burst of noisy life intruding on what was soon to become a valley filled with a tremendous roar and consuming fire, I contacted The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque to try and find out what was up. What were these frogs? I was told that the noise was actually made by Spade foot toads. The little creatures hibernate until it rains, then pop up to eat, procreate, lay their eggs, etc. I found a recording of the sound they make. It’s like little lambs baaing away.

I hid an old fashioned tape recorder in the drawer of a desk I used in the installation, referencing the field office where Frank was stationed the night before the Trinity test. It played Spade Foot toads croaking on a tape loop during the exhibition.

The toads croaked/baaed – until 5:29 am when Trinity dropped from the recycled forest service watch tower it was hanging from, incinerating everything within that ten mile radius.

Here’s a pic of one of the little guys. They use those feet to burrow into the earth backwards until all you see are those big eyes before they disappear underground.

From inspirational prints to actual material

The evolution of the four Japanese woodblock print images from inspiration (‘skin’ and “they sang before the dawn…”) to material (pinkStardust) is a good example of how my artistic process works. Non linear in thought – things connecting with other things. Tangled per se, but then presented in linear matter, reflecting back how we exist in time and space. This couldn’t be expressed more clearly than in the structures in both form and content of pinkStardust.

Creating an installation is not typically spontaneous work for me. This has been particularly true for the three installations that make up MMP. They all require a lot of thinking, a lot of research and a lot of tangling together of both free and purposefully connected associations before I begin making either forms or images.

Thus, the gift of spontaneity doesn’t generally show up in my process until I am actually creating the elements that will form, and inform, the installation. As with any artwork the material and the muse both have something to say about it once my hands begin making. And when creating the installation itself, in its space (placing elements and adding the surfacing, sound, lighting…), I always leave time for response – because sometimes the site has something to say about it, and I need to heed what is being said or the whole installation suffers.

My Manhattan Project

In this posting I related how My Manhattan Project was born and evolved from one installation to three. “skin”, the first in the series, (exhibited in 2001) -contrasting and comparing elements and events of our war with Imperial Japan (WWII), ending with the dawning of our atomic age.

The third installation in the series, called NUMEC: destroyer of worlds, is a more personal examination of our atomic history. It is about the uranium processing plant where my father worked after returning from fighting in WWII. After surviving two injuries in the war (shot and blown up), for which he received two purple hearts and a Bronze Star, he was irradiated during his time at NUMEC, never felt well again, and died from the cancer it caused some years later. NUMEC: destroyer of worlds is in the development stages and will be exhibited sometime in the future.

Then there is the second in the My Manhattan Project series. The installation that, as the title of my blog states, I am actively searching for both exhibition space and scheduled exhibition time – somewhere on or near the dirt where most of the story took place. pinkStardust.

In pinkStardust I continue my examination of our atomic history by focusing on the testing times (roughly 1945-1970) – the height of atomic tourism and the strange dichotomy used to keep us both fascinated and terrified.

Next Time

In future postings I’ll continue to talk about creating pinkStardust – the themes, organizing structures, elements I’m making, and the tangles of people and events. Future posts will go into more detail about specific pieces, like The Four Enola Geishas – the appropriated images of the Japanese woodblock print images discussed above, that I reworked to help tell the story of pinkStardust.

My blog about my search for a scheduled exhibition space for pinkStardust, (the second in my series My Manhattan Project – three installations about our atomic history: skin, pinkStardust, and NUMEC: Destroyer of Worlds continues with…

The 32 Most Notorious Atomic Tests, a body of work being created as a fundraiser for pinkStardust. “Suggested” by my main muse and collaborator Andy Warhol as a way to fund materials and supplies for making objects, images and purchasing surfacing supplies (like pink sand and pink bingo chips), The 32 Most Notorious Atomic Tests will be sold, hopefully, at an auction-like event that will both raise money and promote the yet unscheduled exhibition of the installation.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I am hoping to create the installation somewhere near the dirt where many of the events I am talking about in pinkStardust took place. Of course if we are talking about fallout, any place in the US, or the world for that matter, works, but that’s a discussion for another time.

The 32 Most Notorious Atomic Tests is a series of thirty-two works on canvas, skinned in aluminum foil (matte side out) then loosely painted with black acrylic paint. I am painting my impressions of the various tests in black and white (and shades of grey) based on images downloaded from the net – and printed out in black and white.

This image shows a prepped canvas and printed image of the the Badger test, blown on April 18, 1953 – the 6th in Operation Upshot-Knothole, Nevada Testing Site (NTS), 60 miles NE of Las Vegas.

The canvases are 16″ x 20″, the same size Warhol used to paint his 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans series, exhibited in Los Angeles Ferris Gallery in 1962. Surfacing of the canvases for The 32 Most Notorious Atomic Tests was chosen to reference Warhol’s 13 Most Wanted Men – created for the World’s Fair New York State Pavillon in 1964. This piece was not seen by the public as it was ordered to be painted over – which it was, using silver paint.

And of course the foil references Warhol’s material of choice to cover the ceiling and walls of his studio in New York city called the Factory (a feat conceived and completed by his good friend Billy Name).

In my previous blog posting I wrote about the relationship between pinkStardust, Warhol and me, within the context of using aluminum foil as a material for objects and imagery for my installation. As I continue my blog, and my search for time and space for pinkStardust, I will be talking about the entanglement of Warhol in the story told in the installation itself.

As with any discussion of historic, and historical, events, we all know that they do not happen in a vacuum. People’s interactions and participations in our atomic testing times are no different and are what pinkStardust is all about. Odd choices made and synchronicities uncovered during research into the time of pinkStardust (roughly 1945 – 1970, with a narrowed focus on the 50s & 60s of the Cold War years) that I wrap in the colored cellophane of atomic testing viewed through the rose colored glasses of atomic tourism.

I have begun painting The 32 Most Notorious Atomic Tests – having completed about five of the canvases (mostly, as I may tweak them a bit).

One of the things that has struck me is how beautiful the images of those tests are when viewed as abstracts. When the truth of the images seeps in however, they are chilling. It is clear that what the images portray just isn’t “right”. The phenomenon of the explosions feels like they go against nature itself – forced upon her in the most violent way…

This is an image from Operation Ivy of the test titled Mike, exhibiting a phenomenon that sometimes happens early in the detonation process. The phenomenon is called Rope Trick – this image was taken by one of the many who photographed the tests, Harold Eugene “Doc” Edgerton, or “Papa Flash”.

I will be painting more images of Rope Tricks from other tests as I move through The 32 Most Notorious Atomic Tests.

And I will be revisiting this series from time to time on my blog as I complete the canvases, and schedule the event where they will be sold.

Next time I will write about the form pinkStardust has been developing since I first conceived it, and began researching for it, in 2012 – how the story is framed, the objects, images and surfacing I’m using to tell the story, and the way the installation takes on the look of the pop attitude that overlaid the way our government asked us to prepare for possible nuclear attack by the Soviet Union.

My continuing series of pinkStardust: my search for time and space.

What do aluminum foil and Andy Warhol have to do with me or pinkStardust?

Andy as my Main Muse: Andy is very important both as part of the story I am telling in pinkStardust (I will write about that in more detail when I discuss the framework of the installation, the timeline) and as inspiration for the look of the installation (his work as a Pop artist). As development of the installation has evolved, so has Andy’s role as muse – both supporting and even suggesting work. He’s my Main Muse!

When I first realized that skin, the installation that became the first in MMP (My Manhattan Project) was not a stand alone work back in 2012, I began developing the timeline and a poster for pinkStardust that would serve as a guide for the look of the installation.

Work on the poster quickly became problematic as I struggled to create the right image of the atomic explosion in the cocktail glass. I drew and erased, drew and erased, drew and erased… Painted, then painted over it, painted, and again painted over it… Finally in great frustration I raised my head to the heavens and yelled out loud “Andy, help me!” In 10 minutes the image was done.

Here are a couple of images of the poster during my struggle with rendering the atomic explosion. Andy helped me and in doing so I realized the completed image was also a better choice because it was a generic explosion – not just representing one explosion (as these pics where I was working from a pic of the Trinity test)

I made the poster using material that had been damaged – there was a rip extending from mid-center bottom to about one third up the canvas. I mended it using medical tape. My choice of using a damaged/mended canvas for the poster is an example of how I choose materials when creating installations (some sort of conceptual significance) however this choice became even more interesting to me when I later ran across Richard Avedon’s photo of Andy exposing his damaged and repaired body after the shooting he suffered in 1968 (one of Avedon’s photos, below). Andy is damaged, mended, scarred.

The completed poster for pinkStardust.

Aluminum foil: One of the materials I have been using quite a bit of making images for pinkStardust is aluminum foil. This began when I was completing The Four Enola Geishas for the installation (I will be posting a page on making The Four Enola Geishas later) and needed to decide how to present the information about the original woodblocks prints that I had appropriated (a process used a lot by Warhol and other Pop artists). Once again frustrated by trial and error attempts, I asked Andy for guidance and his Silver Factory of 1964 came to mind and rescue.

I skinned the bottom of each canvas with aluminum foil (using the matte side to make it a reference to, not a copying of) and painted the info on top in black – information about the original artist of the woodblock print, and information about the altered image I created (such as info on the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

Good choice! Then came the next problem to creatively solve. Since each Enola Geisha will be hung in the middle of the gallery when the installation is exhibited I needed to attend to the backs of the canvases.

I tried painting them completely black. No. Too visually engulfing. Next I considered applying a vintage Asian fabric to each. No. Too decorative. Then I skinned each of them using the matte side of aluminum foil just as I had on the front. Perfect.

Adding schematics of a uranium atom, plutonium atom, a water molecule and a DNA strand in a broken line-type printing (referencing Andy’s early work as a commercial artist) completed The Four Enola Geishas and continued my referencing the Pop Art movement and especially Warhol’s work.

This is an image of a plutonium atom – printed onto the back of Nagasaki Maiden, one of the Four Enola Geishas.

Again, I will write more about the choice of each schematic when I post a page about the making of The Four Enola Geishas.

I am continuing to use the process of skinning works using the matte side of aluminum foil for some of the other pieces for pinkStardust, such as the large canvas called Castle Bravo.

Here’s a detail of the Castle Bravo canvas – skinned in aluminum foil with a drawing of the thermonuclear test rendered using white pipe cleaners. I’ll write more about this image and material choices as well in a later posting.

I recently began a new series of works called The 32 Most Notorious Atomic Tests. It will be sold as a fundraiser for materials and supplies for pinkStardust. It begins with 32 canvases 16″ x 20″ in size, skinned using the matte side of aluminum foil, then covered with a couple of coats of black paint. More references to Andy and his work.

I’ll write about the making of The 32 Most Notorious Atomic Tests (still in progress) with my next posting of pinkStardust: my search for time and space.

pinkStardust is the second sculptural installation in my series exploring our atomic age that I call My Manhattan Project.

In it I illuminate the strange dichotomy that existed during our atomic testing times.

An idea for a pin, available for sale at the installation site gift shop.

It was called The Cold War, spanning the years between the end of World War Two and the fall of the Berlin wall. It was the time when children were trained to duck and cover by a cartoon turtle called Tommy and told not to eat the snow (as it contained nuclear fallout from the atomic testing being conducted in the Nevada desert, 60 miles northeast of Las Vegas). It was the time that our parents were urged to build a backyard bomb shelter in order survive the coming Armageddon threatened by the USSR at any moment.

But, in the meantime, we ate atomic-themed food, wallpapered our new hip pads with atomic-themed imagery, drank atomic cocktails and danced to atomic music.

Just as those who lived through the insanity and carnage of WWI responded with an art movement called Da Da, danced to hot jazz and drank bathtub gin, so we went a little Pop with the atom and it’s glowing possibilities for good, evil and the “That’s all folks” potential of world annihilation.

My goal in creating pinkStardust is not to judge past decisions made by folks living in a different time, in a different context. What I am doing is shining a spotlight on our past, hoping that we will make contact with those decisions and perhaps plot a future course with the atom that is not destructive, but instead, full of positive potential.

I wonder. Will our choices be different?

Copper cut out of a peace crane. Detail of Wind Chime, originally exhibited in my first My Manhattan Project installation, skin in 2001.

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.