2/6/09
![February 5 – March 14, 2009
“We live in a time of explosions.” –Joseph Beuys
TEN MILLION DEGREES is the temperature of a nuclear blast and the title of Claudia X Valdes’ first one-person exhibition at Lawrimore Project. Since the Fall of 2001, Valdes has plumbed the cultural climate of fear and trauma relating to nuclear holocaust and apocalyptic threat. This exhibition marks the first time this body of work has been assembled in one place. Working in a variety of media—photography, performance, video, interactive installation and painting—her work is a rehearsal for the end of the world. Although tapping the specific significance of the atomic age, Valdes’ work speaks to universal notions of death, history and memory, or as Michael Perlman puts it, “the soul’s nuclear situation.”
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“What does it mean to remember the nuclear image?”
IN THE MAIN SPACE
The Main Space of the gallery will feature photographs, watercolors, an intermedia piece and a video installation.
From 2006-2008, Valdes visited the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico on the two days of the year it is open to the public. In the photographs, “Zero,” “End Times,” “Provenance,” and “Vestiges,” she exposes the ‘radioactive’ landscape and explores notions of place, memory and history in this highly charged and emotional site of America’s past.
“Zero,” (2008) [right] is a photograph of a structure situated directly next to Ground Zero where the Trinity Test was conducted. This shelter protects a portion of the original crater created by the blast. Valdes complicates the image by enhancing the colors, imbuing the subject with an imagined radioactivity. This move from actual to imagined puts into question our expectations and collective vision of what this site means.
“End Times,” (2008) [below right] is a pseudo-documentary photograph of a performance near the McDonald Ranch house at the Trinity Site. Here, Valdes embodies the fear of the bomb, reenacting what it could have been like on Ground Zero, July 16, 1945. In doing so, she interrogates our collective fear while questioning the source of that fear—images deployed in the media and etched on our consciousness purporting to represent these horrific events.

“What is the role of beauty in the terrible?”
“Tests,” (2006) [shown at right] is a suite of 12 watercolor studies of atmospheric nuclear bomb tests conducted by the Department of Energy in Nevada. Modeled after JMW Turner’s beautiful watercolors of terrible storms and the romantic notion of the sublime, the works play upon the sensuous visual qualities of atom bombs, which as spectacle serve to capture a universal imagination of the modern apocalypse.
“How does repetition represent psychological trauma?”
“Recurring Dream, Nine,” (2002) [below] juxtaposes 2-dimensional media with video. The digital print "wallpaper" is composited from 30 documentary photographs of nuclear atmospheric tests done by the Department of Energy in Nevada. The video component consists of a 10 minute loop created from a 2 second clip of a woman sleeping that is altered and repeated continuously. Over the course of the loop the woman's sleep varies from easy to restless.

How do you destroy the world in 5 minutes?”
“129:291,” (2002) [video right] is a large video installation in the Main Space. Viewers are first confronted by a ‘bunker-like’ piece of architecture. Inside the bunker, the video is projected on an entire wall in an uncomfortably close proximity to the viewer. The content of this work is the first-ever-televised broadcast of an atomic bomb test done on March 17, 1953 at Yucca Flats, Nevada. Narrated by Walter Cronkite, the broadcast communicates his impressions and emotive responses while simultaneously describing the military operation as it unfolds.
At the time of it’s making, there were 192 officially recognized countries in the world. As the piece unfolds, 192 repetitions of the film are tiled at half-second intervals. The viewer can calculate: if every country were hit by 3 repeated bombs, the complete destruction of the world occurs in 5 minutes. Valdes’ intention for the work is to have it convey the complexity of our response to viewing such footage. We are seduced by the sublime visual qualities of nuclear explosions yet this attraction is coupled with a horror which stems from understanding the destructive power of such instruments.
"I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End." --Revelation 22:13
IN THE WHITE CUBE
"Revelation 2213," (2009) is an interactive networked video installation incorporating live video feed and real-time chromakey. The installation is configured to allow participants to see themselves mapped in real-time against an exploding nuclear bomb
The piece creates a scenario in which participants are required to negotiate their corporeal bodies with a background video created from animated photographs of nuclear atmospheric tests. Physical reality is combined with a ‘virtual’ space, yielding a new hybrid-reality.
For the most part, the bomb exists in collective memory and imagination. The only people who have ever had to negotiate their corporeality with the bomb are those in Japan along with the soldiers and local inhabitants near nuclear test sites.
How will people respond when seeing themselves, their bodies, in the hybrid space? Are U.S. civil defense drills so deeply engrained that they will perform these steps? Will they make gestures to protect themselves? Will they enact fear? Run away? Or will they remain strong in the face of their own mortality?
Whatever the response, participants can take a snapshot of themselves occupying the hybrid space with the bomb and performing such gestures. These snapshots will immediately upload to www.revelation2213.com which will house the archive of ‘performances’. The website will grow over time to hold an archive of up to one million photographs documenting the participants actions.
"Death's house of shadows."
IN THE HALL
Painted from film stills, the "Sites of Trauma," series (2002) [right] was created in response to viewing the documentary footage of the military's exercise, “Operation Doorstop.” This operation was conducted by the Department of Civil Defense during the 1950's and consists of the construction and simulation of domestic environments. These sites were created solely for the purpose to drop upon them a nuclear bomb. The exercise was conducted to ascertain the outcome of such domestic environments if attacked by a nuclear bomb.
Included in this series are stills which focus on mannequins being set up in a bedroom, far depth of field shots of the houses, and the aftermath of the bomb. The pathology created by the simultaneous destruction of a domestic environment and the larger landscape is what is of particular interest to Valdes in these intimate paintings.
“Vestiges,” (2008) [right] is a black and white photograph of the remains of corrals and holding pens adjacent to the McDonald Ranch house. It documents actual ruins, showing how the blast from the Trinity Test made the roof bow inwards and how some of the roofing was completely blown away. The drama of this landscape evokes images of the Hiroshima ground zero and its devastation.

"Rehearsing the end of the world."
IN THE BLACK BOX
"Minutes to Midnight," (2008) is a 10 minute, 26 second video that distends an 8.5 second Super 8 film of a performance at the McDonald Ranch House at the Trinity Test Site. The McDonald Ranch is where the bomb for the Trinity Test was assembled and Valdes enacts what her response might have been had she been at the site during the atomic bomb test in 1945. Over the course of two years Valdes performanced this enacted response during the open-to-the-public days.
Using the house like a film-set, Valdes modeled the performances and finished look after nuclear sci-fi films from the 50's. The finished piece is dark, moody and grainy as her excruciatingly extended "flight" from the ranch house captures all the emotion, fear and revelation of visual mediation running throughout all the work in the exhibition.
IN THE BACK ROOM
In 1951 the Department of Civil Defense in collaboration with the National Education Association released "Duck and Cover", a film highlighting a cartoon character of a turtle that pulls into its shell when an atomic flash occurs, and aims to initiate children in an unthreatening manner into the conversation of how to protect oneself in the event of nuclear war. Friendly and lighthearted in tone, the subtext of the film conveys the idea that everything will be just fine during a nuclear war if only one is ready--if only one learns how to duck and cover.
Valdes appropriated this film, and synthesize it with bright pixilated and flashing animated explosions created from watercolors she painted of atmospheric nuclear tests. In tandem, the sonic dimension of the piece combines nuclear windstorms and thundering explosions with the original film soundtrack, and clashes these with jarring audio bleeps and glitches evocative of alarms and digital artifacts.
The title alludes to fallout and the aesthetic of a post nuclear world.
BIOGRAPHY
Claudia X. Valdes was born in Santiago, Chile. Her family moved to the United States when she 3 years old. Her undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley included architecture, modern dance and fine arts. She received her MFA from UC Berkeley in 2001.
Since the fall of 2001, her work has centered on the history of nuclear arms in the United States. Included in studio investigations have been scientific, previously classified military documents, narrative survivor accounts, and media related material. Works created from these investigations have been realized in various forms including: performance, painting, photography, film, video, and interactive media.
Valdes' work has exhibited internationally including at venues such as: the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; WRO Center for Media Art, Wroclaw, Poland; the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland; the UCR/California Museum of Photography; Art in General, New York; Centro Multimedia/Centro National de las Artes, Mexico; the Werkstˇ˝tten und Kulturhaus, Austria; and the National Centre for Contemporary Art in Moscow, Russia
Recent creative awards include an Honorable Mention at the 2006 Transmediale festival for art and digital culture in Berlin, Germany; a 2006 Professional Development Retreat at the Santa Fe Art Institute awarded by Creative Capital; an Artist Grant from the Puffin Foundation in 2007; and a 2008 Scholarship from the Santa Fe Art Institute. Valdes was awarded the Eisner Prize in Art from the University of California, Berkeley, and she was an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts from 2001-2003.
Valdes currently lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico.](6_CLAUDIA_X._Valdes_files/shapeimage_2.png)
CLAUDIA X. Valdes • TEN MILLION DEGREES
Sites of Trauma #1-6, 2002
Oil on wood
3.5” x 5” each (suite of 6)
REVELATION 2213 / www revelation2213.com, 2009
Interactive Networked Installation
Computer, external harddrive, LCD monitor,
video camera, footpedal, custom software
Dimensions variable
192:291, 2002
Digital video
5 minutes
Edition of 5
Recurring Dream, Nine, 2002 (detail above; full image left)
Digital print on board, video monitor, 10 minute video
48” x 60”
Unique
TESTS, 2006
Watercolors on paper
11” 16” each (suite of 12)
End Times, 2008
C-Print
48” x 64”
Edition of 3 + 2AP
To Trinity, With Love, 2007
C-Print
37.5” x 50”
Edition of 5 + 2AP
Blasts #1, #2, #3, 2005
Watercolor and guache on paper
11” x 14” each
White City of the Future, 2006
Digital video
9 minutes 30 seconds
Edition of 5
Minutes to Midnight, 2008
Super 8 transferred to video
10 minutes 26 seconds
Edition of 5
Vestiges, 2008
C-Print
48” x 64”
Edition of 3 + 2AP
top: Zero, 2008
C-Print
48” x 64”
Edition of 3 + 2AP
ALPHA, OMEGA, 2007
Duratrans on lightbox
26” x 40”
Edition of 3
