Loveland artist Sharon Carlisle will debut her most recent art installation, “pinkStardust”, a project 25 years in the making, at the Loveland Museum this Friday.
The second in a three-part series Carlisle calls “My Manhattan Project,” “pinkStardust” opens nearly 25 years to the day after her first installation, “Skin,” debuted in the same gallery where Carlisle and a team of volunteers are now hard at work installing “pinkStardust.”
The multi-decade project reflects Carlisle’s fascination with the atomic age and the apocalyptic potential of nuclear weapons; “pinkStardust,” named for the colloquial term for radioactive dust used by residents of Las Vegas when it would fall in and around the city, is a pop-culture infused look at the impacts of nuclear fission and fusion on the American consciousness, as well as on the bodies of actual Americans.
Carlisle has what she describes as an obsession with the topic, compulsively absorbing information about nuclear testing and its consequences and feeding those inputs into her work, which will occupy the entire main gallery at the museum, 503 N. Lincoln Ave., from Saturday through April 11.
The tone of “pinkStardust” is of a very mid-century kind, and she said that Andy Warhol served as a muse for the installation.
It includes a dizzying amount of artwork, all Carlisle’s creations, ranging from a mid-century television that will play a black-and-white video on loop about nuclear testing to a horse skull wearing a gas mask, a reference to Chinese horses being sent into nuclear test sites wearing protective equipment so their riders could study what was left in the blasts’ wake.
While the installation is historical in nature, and Carlisle hopes visitors will learn something from attending. It’s not a history exhibit, and she balked at long captions for each piece that explained their relevance. A gallery guide is available that has further reading contextualizing her work and providing historical information, but her hope is that visitors will experience her art on its face first, and then consult the guide for more information that could change their experience on a second look.
“My goal is to tell you what this experience was like, to try to get you to feel what this experience was like,” she said, referring to her effort to grapple with the cultural and political nature of nuclear weapons in the middle of the 20th century. “That’s why I’m using the colors I am, and the crazy, kitschy sparkles, that’s all 1950s, 1960s Las Vegas pop kitsch.”
The climax of the exhibition is a mandala, a geometrical pattern often sketched in sand. Carlisle’s mandala is composed of small spheres of mud made with earth from nuclear test sites in Nevada (now safe to handle), like the Trinity site, as well as from the Loveland Cemetery and the cemetery where Carlisle’s father is buried.
Her father’s memory looms over the exhibit. He died of cancer stemming from his work at a nuclear test site in Pennsylvania after he returned from World War II, although she hadn’t known that at the time that she had completed her first installation in 2001, “Skin.”
It’s one of many little “entanglements,” small coincidences that she continued to find as she explored a topic that fixated her for reasons she couldn’t quite explain, but perhaps became clearer after she began to learn more.
Warhol, her muse, just so happened to celebrate his birthday the day the United States dropped the first nuclear bomb ever used in wartime on Hiroshima in Japan, for instance.
Another is more personal. The plant her father worked at in Pennsylvania manufactured fuel pellets for nuclear submarines.
“The very first nuclear submarine was launched on my birthday,” she said. “The actual day I was born. And he’s making these uranium pellets that are fueling these things. That’s just too weird.”
A member’s opening reception will be held on Friday at the Loveland Museum from 5-7 p.m., with an artist welcome from Carlisle at 5:30 p.m.
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