The NMSU Art Museum’s latest exhibition, “Specter New Mexico”, analyzes questions surrounding the history of testing bombs and mining uranium in the American West in the Atomic Age and Cold War era, and the devastation it inflicted in parts of states such as New Mexico. Scott Brocato spoke with “Specter New Mexico’s” artist, Cara Despain, and the NMSU Art Museum’s director, Marisa Sage, about the exhibit.
“Love One Another”, a Mormon hymn that plays over a compilation of actual filmed test site nuclear explosions, is an affecting juxtaposition during “Test of Faith”, the centerpiece of “Specter New Mexico” at the New Mexico State University Art Museum in Devasthali Hall. Its artist is Cara Despain, who explained to me what “Specter New Mexico” is about and what inspired her to create it.
“This is an amalgamation of work that I’ve been researching and working on for the past five-ish years,” she said. “I typically work with concepts of western landscapes in different ways, usually exposing the dark underbelly; so this is pretty much all legacy of nuclearism testing and uranium mining-specific.”
The subject matter hits close to home to Despain, whose family are “downwinders”.
“This is in some ways more personal to me because my family originates in southern Utah, downwind of the Nevada test site,” she explained. “So there’s a whole contingent of downwinders in Utah. And in this region in general, there’s lots of downwinders. But that is kind of a specific community that I’m thinking of that this work stems from.”
She acknowledged that because of the prevailing WW2-cold war attitudes of the era, this is a complicated issue among downwinders.
“There are folks that were sort of cajoled into taking up the patriotic side of it, so that was all Cold War weapons development,” she said. “So there was very much this appeal to people in the area, saying, ‘Hey, be patriotic and support this weapons development, because it’s protecting the country! Aren’t you rural folks, aren’t you nice, Mormon settlers, aren’t you so patriotic? Don’t you want to support this?’ So you have that. But you also have people that over time grew completely justified mistrust of that kind of invitation, and they feel ‘They tried to kill us.’”
I asked her about “Test of Faith”, the exhibit’s audio/visual centerpiece, which also features cabinets filled with UV-lit Depression Era glass dishware tinted with uranium oxide.
“So the video is a three-channel installation, and I made it using declassified footage of tests at the Nevada site specifically,” she said. “There’s tens of thousands of videos of U.S. tests, and some of them are from the South Pacific and everything else. But I narrowed in on that (the Nevada site). And I mirrored them, so they’re kind of like Rorschachs. I wanted to take a little bit of the imagery of just mushroom clouds out of it. So that’s the imagery, and then I tinted so they kind of go in a gradient as the video goes on. And the soundtrack is a remixed Mormon hymn called Love One Another.
“This one always stuck with me. It’s got a nice kind of melody, and…there’s just something about it that swells; it has that cinematic connection that I’m talking about. And when I mixed it together and paired it with that imagery, it just created this sort of…weird, otherworldly portrait that did feel connected to that, that was in some ways just…I don’t know, just a nod to that dark part of history.”
What does she hope people will take away from “Specter New Mexico”?
“One thing that I have willfully taken on, a challenge that I’ve taken on, is that it is really hypnotic and really beautiful. And I understand how deeply problematic that is. But what I also understand about art is that it’s kind of all-hands-on-deck with some of these topics that I deal with. Whatever route I need to use to get to people, to get them to feel something or to elicit whatever it is—sorry, fear, awe—I need to use that strategy, because always, they do go on to think and ask questions. And that’s happened with this piece as I’ve shown it. I do feel that people leave affected. And that’s all that I can ask for, by making artwork.”
Marisa Sage is the University Art Museum’s director. She explains why she chose “Specter New Mexico” for the art museum.
“When I moved to New Mexico, one of the things that I spoke to, and still speak a lot about, is how important bringing artists to this community that are really working in subject matter that are specific to Las Cruces, Dona Ana, southern New Mexico, the borderplex region…all to say, Cara’s work means so much in relationship to where we are for where she’s from,” Sage said. “We’re not telling people, ‘This is what you should be thinking about nuclear development and uranium mining.’ We’re saying, ‘Okay, this is a different way that we can start asking new and different questions about this.’”
“Specter New Mexico” runs through September 16th at the University Art Museum at NMSU.
