Nuclear reactions
First atomic bombs inspired artists in exhibit
Yukiyo Kawano folded her ghostly replica of “Fat Man” using pages from the Portland Oregonian, circa August 1945.
The newspapers date to the time an American plane dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.
A third-generation hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor), Kawano created the fullsized replicas using the techniques of Japanese kite production. Silk fabric from her grandmother’s kimono covers “Little Boy’s” under structure, stitched with the artist’s own DNA-altered hair.
The shadow of the nuclear bomb — first detonated at New Mexico’s Trinity Site near Alamogordo 75 years ago — still hovers over artists’ continual response to the devastation as well as more positive uses of nuclear energy decades after the blast.
Online at the Albuquerque Museum, “Trinity: Reflections on the Bomb” offers an aesthetic dimension to scientific and historic exhibitions offered by other New Mexico institutions. The show collects a galaxy of perspectives ranging from environmental damage, to the use of radiation in cancer treatment, incorporating the impact on the downwinders who lived near the site, as well as the native people who worked in uranium mines. Curated by Joseph Traugott, the virtual exhibition is online at cabq.gov/trinity through Sept. 6.
Kawano’s eerie balloon-like structures honor the people lost to the detonations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Portlandbased performance artist was in residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute from 20182019.
“The surfaces undulate with the tiniest amount of wind,” Traugott said. “At the same time, they are the most horrifying things imaginable.”
“She’s reflecting on her cultural history and trauma,” Albuquerque Museum curator of art Josie Lopez said. “For many artists in this exhibition, the work is very personal.”
All of them use their own visual language to ask questions and challenge viewers.
Justino Herrera’s “That Is No Longer Our Smoke Sign” is a 1950s watercolor and pencil drawing of pueblo people watching a mushroom cloud rise over a Cochiti Pueblo church and school.
“It has a very potent and humorous ring to it,” Traugott said.
Phoenix artist Naomi Bebo (Menominee/ Ho-Chunk) created an intricately beaded gas mask from seed beads, deer hide, ermine and ribbons encrusting an Iraqi gas mask.
“In her culture, the mask embodies different kinds of spirits,” Lopez explained. “It can reflect on the power of the spirits. At the same time, it’s a gas mask.”
The mask takes on additional resonance in the time of a pandemic.
“Obviously, we had no idea we were going to be in the situation we’re in, but there’s a certain relevance,” she added.
Irony abounds in Karsten Creightney’s six-part landscape collage. “The Beginning” glows with voluminous New Mexico flowers and trees. A glimpse of a mushroom cloud rises from the right hand corner.
“It’s an aerial view of the imagined vision of what the Trinity explosion looked like on high,” Traugott said. “But the only long-term observers are the plants and animals that have been altered by the radiation of the blast.”
Photographer Will Wilson explores another use for nuclear energy in his “Michael Apollo Gomez” tintype and archival pigment print. Gomez was being treated for cancer.
“He had to protect his skull,” Traugott said. “To do that, they created this metal mask. It appears he’s looking at himself as a ghost.”
Meridel Rubenstein’s “Oppenheimer’s Chair” installation pairs a glass chair encased within a glass house. A video projected onto the chair opens with a slingshot propelling a rock into a glass universe. The heat of the atomic bomb blasted sand into glass at the Trinity Site.
“It asks you about being the director of a very important project and knowing your decision will impact many thousands of people,” Traugott said.
Bruce Nauman’s 1985 lithograph “EarthWorld” literally turns the world upside down by offering a mirror image of its letters.
“Trinity” is not an anniversary project, Traugott stressed.
“It’s a memorial,” he said. “An anniversary is a happy time. This is a time for us to talk about who we are, where we come from and where we are going. It was a time when New Mexico changed the world.
“The half-life of Nagasaki is 24,000 years,” he continued. “Twenty-four thousand years ago was the middle of the Ice Age in New Mexico. These artists aren’t telling you what to think about nuclear energy. They’re asking you to think about it.”