PORTLAND, Ore.—In the cool, hushed atmosphere of Portland’s Newspace Center for Photography, a Geiger counter clicks steadily as I orient myself to the room. White walls, wood floors, and the faint, clean smell of an elementary school auditorium. I was here to see the "Reactive Matters" exhibit, a small collection of photography by three artists whose works document nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, and the disasters that have peppered our history of experimenting with radioactive material.
Photographing Superfund sites with buried nuclear waste and old reactor locations doesn’t always make for compelling visual media. Instead, these artists used radioactivity itself to build more interesting and abstract art.
Jeremy Bolen
Vieques #3, Archival pigment print made from buried film, window screen, artist’s frame, fragments of buried film. 36 in x 40 in.
3 more images in gallery
Digging deep
Chicago-based artist Jeremy Bolen told Ars over the phone that he became interested in nuclear energy after he visited "Site A" in the Red Gate Woods on the former grounds of the Argonne National Laboratory. (Argonne still exists in Illinois, but the lab was moved in 1947.) Site A became the first nuclear waste dumping ground in the US after scientists built an early nuclear reactor there in 1943.
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