Meridel Rubenstein and Ellen Zweig
The first A-bomb threw off such a blinding light and cast such long shadows that ordinary film couldn’t really register the explosion. Photographs of the bombing of Hiroshima exist, as do pictures of the victims, but they are too abstract and too gruesome respectively to bring into focus the mysterious specter that haunts the middle of this century.
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In Critical Mass, a photography-based multimedia installation six years in the making, Meridel Rubenstein and Ellen Zweig undertake the challenge of seeing the unseeable by focusing on the genesis of the bomb, at the laboratory and test site in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Both artists have some ties to the project: Rubenstein received her MFA from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and Zweig holds a PhD in literature from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where back in the late 1930s, at summer school for theoretical physicists, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Samuel Goudsmit, George Uhlenbeck, and others met to exchange news of developments in the race to harness nuclear power. The artists used their own photos as well as archival photographs from such sources as the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in New Mexico and the Bradbury Science Museum at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): “Edith’s House” by Meridel Rubenstein.
