We Considered Ourselves to be a Powerful Culture
Three Proposals for a Violent Act
Is This a Place of Honor?
Is Any Highly Esteemed Deed Commemorated Here?
Is Anything Valued Here?
2023. Three cork bulletin boards, nine fiber baryta photograms, sketch paper, video projection, metallic inkjet print. 24 in x 108 in.
We leave marks upon the earth as monuments, reminders, and warnings that we existed. Jean Tinguley's Study for an End of the World No. 2, which parodied the Mojave Desert nuclear weapons tests of the 1950s, inspired me to read the Department of Energy's 1993 study Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, in which two groups of experts propose warning monuments that might deter humans from disturbing still deadly nuclear waste in the far future. This led to further research on geologic studies conducted in the Mojave in the years after the tests. Traveling to the Jean Dry Lake Bed where Study for an End of the World No. 2 took place, I used analog photography and digital video to recreate documentation photographs of Tinguley’s Happening. I then made marks upon the resulting images using three methods. Each of the three bulletin boards shows a result of one of my “proposals”: nine darkroom photograms which depict an explosion of research, a video which overlays text adapted from the DOE’s proposals onto images a quaking lakebed, and a digital scan of a section of 35mm film whose blotch of over-exposure obliterates the landscape and evokes the effect of radiation on film.
Installation documentation by Keeva Lough and Becca Schwartz.
Exhibition History
2023. Modern Desert Markings, Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, Las Vegas, NV.