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BLAST SITE: A MONUMENT FOR FUTURE FAILURES, 2011

Gabie Strong and Danielle McCullough

Cyanotype fabric, painted leather, slipcrete, silver, ash, paint, pallets, wood, 16mm film with pen and ink, 16mm projector

Join our workshop on conjecture at HDTS!

Blast Site is an imagined remnant of mythic global disaster, in which the cyanotype is used to document traces of history and cinematic projection is used to create ritual magic.

Our sculpture calls upon the process of tracing light and time in both photographic and sculptural form. Blast Site is a multi-paneled structure marking survival in the high desert, invoking both the ancient and the new. During the day it serves as a sculptural monument, invoking the mystery of the analog pressed against modernist hard-edged geometry, to create a post-apocalyptic survival site reminiscent of dated science fiction literature. At night it serves as a 16mm projection surface for dancing phosphenes, summoning the paleolithic reasoning of a prehistoric animal praxis.

Working as traces of footprints embedded into pavement like shadows after an atomic blast, the process of cyanotype sun printing draws apparitions of time to render a new image, a silhouette of white in a sea of bright blue. The geometry of our sculpture allows for hard-edged shadows of multiple angles to fall across the desert plane, casting a virtual non-site underfoot, while the printed fabric promotes poetic imagery of the banal, industrial, and floral.

At dusk the material emphasis of the sculpture fades, and the silhouette of the hexagonal shapes take form. These shapes become projection surfaces for Gabie Strong's pen and ink drawings on 16mm film. Strong’s films are loosely animated stretches of gestural abstraction, ethereal washes of bright color shimmering in the night, lines of color moving and changing shape with each second of time. Strong’s film-drawings flicker against the skins of rigid primary geometries, giving life to Blast Site as an animated color-field surface in the darkness of night.

Blast Site from gabiestrong on Vimeo.

Looped for your psychotropic desires:

Blast Site from gabiestrong on Vimeo.