pinkStardust: my search for time and space

Would you be surprised to discover that you are expendable?  That your life has no value other than as a test subject?  That decisions are made about your life without your knowledge or consent? That double speak and strategies from a military operations manual created in the 1930s (the Psychological Operations manual) may be defining the parameters of your existence?  Sounds crazy, right? Like a conspiracy theory.

Well, as Inga said to her new husband Fredrick in Mel Brooks' "Young Frankenstein" "Hold on to your hat darling!" Because the story of our atomic history, especially the era of our testing times, is so crazy that it could be a Mel Brooks movie!

I call the story, as expressed in my art installation, pinkStardust.

The concept for pinkStardust first came into my consciousness in 2012 - and I've been obsessed with it ever since, and maybe that's a little crazy too.

pinkStardust is the second of a three installation series I call My Manhattan Project that began in 2001 when I exhibited an installation called skin (2001 Loveland Museum/Gallery, Loveland, CO) - although I didn't know it would be part of a series at the time.

BTW - The third installation of My Manhattan Project will be called NUMEC: Destroyer of Worlds about a uranium processing plant in Apollo PA where my dad worked after returning from service in WWII.  But that story and the installation come later.

A photo of NUMEC before it was torn down and became a Super Fund site (clean up of uranium).


skin contrasted and compared events that happened during our war with Imperial Japan (WWII), culminating with the birth of our nuclear age.

It was also the first glimmer of my obsession with our nuclear history, fueled by personal experiences that were traumatic for me and my family, as well as the rest of the planet and all living things, above, on and in it.

A gallery view of skin.   On the floor Oahu, a scale model of Oahu, Hawaii, skinned in vintage army uniforms with empty oyster shells making the bombings of Pearl Harbor.  To the right, four Battle Banners, yellow 'silk' on bamboo poles, stamped with schematics of of Japanese aircraft (Pearl Harbor), Fatman (atomic bomb), Little Boy (atomic bomb) and the forth, an empty field.  In the back, Water Offering. A punch bowl full of water sitting atop a plaster pillar skinned in burned monkey fur.  To the left, Wind Chime.  Schematics of an oyster shell, Fatman, a Japanese Zero and a peace crane cut from copper sheeting.  

A gallery view of Temple Bells.  Cottonwood logs skinned in sheep skin fur and suspended by aircraft wire.  Lit green to reference "Pearls of Trinity", the fused sand that was transformed into green glass when the first atomic blast, the Trinity test, was performed in Los Alamos N.M.

My challenge with skin was to answer the question "How can I discuss the mutual suffering that occurred within these events without repelling installation visitors? Without discounting anyone's story or their experiences of these events?  Without taking sides?" A position I was fortunate to take had I wanted to because I had not experienced any of the very painful events I was discussing in skin first hand.  

My goal wasn't to express the horror of those events however, my goal was to discuss how we can help it not happen again. 

A future posting will provide more images and descriptions of skin (its objects, surfaces, lighting and invitation for visitor participation), when I discuss how choices about processes and materials for skin informed the same for pinkStardust.


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