HELLDORADO DAYS
Single channel video, two-channel slide projection.
This installation uses timed 35mm slide projectors and digital video to examine the theater of nuclear testing in 1950s Las Vegas through the lens of the artist’s family history. Post WWII Las Vegas flourished: high rise hotel casinos rose from the desert, suburban tract housing sprawled to hold the growing middle class, and tourist markets boomed as the government found a way to cast nuclear destruction as spectacle. It became a ritual for the artist’s grandfather, a government employee and amateur photographer, to pack his family in the car, pre-dawn and drive out to the edge of Nellis Airforce Base to watch the clouds billow.
Held throughout most of the 20th century, Helldorado Days were a local festival celebrating the “Wild West,” explicitly, and western expansionism, implicitly. Old family slides of both atomic tests and the Helldorado Days parade are paired with artist rendered footage of imagined test zone sites, drawing out the elements of fantasy, fiction and fabrication involved in the public’s understanding of nuclear technology and its long and short term effects.
