Josephine

Just left of a horizon blinding those watching in searing white light, stood an empty ranch house casting short shadows in the red dirt and holding its walls together as the world split open.

On July 16, 1945, the world’s first nuclear device dubbed “Trinity” was detonated in the Jordana del Muerto desert southeast of Socorro, New Mexico. Just two miles from the detonation site was the McDonald Ranch house, owned by an immigrant family who were forcibly evicted by the US military. What is little known about this cataclysmic event is that it was in the master bedroom of this otherwise innocuous domestic space that the two plutonium hemispheres for the pit of Trinity, along with other components of the first nuclear bomb, was assembled.

In the decades that followed, hundreds of atmospheric and underground nuclear tests would take place around the world, many directly and purposefully exposing peoples, communities, and ecological systems to radioactive fallout. A total of 528 atmospheric tests and 1,528 underground tests have been documented.

This project examines notions of home, toxicity, and nationalism through the historical McDonald Ranch House, moving through this literal occupation of the home as a starting point to interrogating notions of contamination, violence, and dispossession enacted by nation states through political ideologies and military intervention.

Surrounded by the blown glass and plasma are spherical porcelain vessels. Unique to Korea, the moon jar (dal hang-ari) takes two separately thrown bowls and joining them together to form a discernible seam, each moon jar’s unique characteristics fall on the asymmetrical line of its equator. This process, in addition to the clay body, glaze, and conditions in the kiln, results in subtle and welcome distortions in the form’s shape. To this day, the moon jar is a highly prized object for the skill it takes to fabricate and its distinctive shape and method of construction. Formally, the moon jar reflected much of the philosophy of the Joseon period (1392–1910) and its Confucian principles.

Within this work, the whole and bifurcated forms of the moon jars echo a multiplicity of referents (body, bomb, container for nuclear waste, cold war sculptures of women, postwar gender, and so forth) that proposes it as a form in perpetual precarity, transformation, and ambiguity.

Containment as an attempt at control and limitation of electromagnetic fields permeating beyond impermeable glass, of precarious containers and conditions that store nuclear waste, of politics that reinforce nationalist rhetoric and allegory and curtail 'foreign' influence, and of material and ideological dynamics of power.

Glass as a material connects to various points of time: at the moment of the explosion of Trinity when the surrounding desert sand melted into radioactive glass trinitite; during the fabrication and documentation of the bomb with optics and photographic technology; through vitrifying nuclear waste into solid glass in an attempt to slow the enormity of accumulated radioactive matter contaminating our world.