"In Commemoration of Gardi Sugdub, 2024" /Installation at William Turner Gallery, Santa Monica, CA, oil on canvas, 96” x 72”
“In Commemoration of Gardi Sugdub”, concerns the fate of islands in the Panamanian Archipelago, where the landmasses are becoming too flooded and the environs too polluted to sustain the culture. This painting is derived from a reference composite of three drone photos taken from news media. My current project is a series of large-scale oil paintings sourced from images of ecological trauma, captured from the vantage point of drones. I seek to re-examine the role of epic landscape painting, the Sublime and representation, while simultaneously referencing our very real and pressing climate change dilemmas in a series of collaborative projects with artists of different disciplines.
The Project:
Gardi Sugdub is a disappearing island, and its inhabitants are being re-located to the Panamanian mainland in clear-cut jungle cubicles (bottom image). The island is located in San Blas, the autonomous territory of the Gunas, who populated the area after rebelling and fleeing the Panamanian government’s demands that they change their culture.
I would like to address this topic through painting, photography and video, most likely in a collaborative way with artists that have similar topics. One idea in mind is to hire a company to take a high-def satellite photo of Gardi every week, to chronicle its demise (It is already smaller than when I painted it 6 months ago…). This material could be turned into a projection, perhaps with a soundtrack created by a colleague that has visited there and has recorded the music of the Guna (Jacqueline Arias).
"Runit Dome, Marshall Islands" is part of a recent project making “epically-scaled” landscape paintings of traumatized sites.
The Runit Dome was constructed by the US SArmy Corps of Engineers between 1977 and 1980 in order to contain radioactive waste from America’s Cold War nuclear tests — but it’s begun to crack.
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated 67 nuclear and atmospheric bombs on Enewetak Atoll and Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Looking to gain an advantage over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, the United States used the island nation as a testing site, dropping not only nuclear bombs, but biological weapons as well. The story of the Runit Dome starts in the 1940s, when the U.S. identified the Marshall Islands as a suitable site for testing nuclear weapons. This calculation, according to The Guardian, was made based on the nation’s low population and distance from other countries and shipping lanes.
In 1946, the United States dropped its first nuclear bomb on the islands. Over the next five years, eight more nuclear bombs — ranging from 23 to 225 kilotons — were detonated near both Enewetak Atoll and Bikini Atoll.
By the 1970s, the U.S. had exhausted its need for testing weapons on the Marshall Islands. Decades of explosions, however, had battered the once edenic landscape, leaving huge craters, destroying entire islands, and, worst of all, leaving behind tons of radioactive waste. The Atomic Energy Commission, (today’s Department of Energy) and the Department of Defense came up with a plan to collect radioactive debris from across the Enewetak Atoll and dump it into the Runit crater, then cover the whole thing with a concrete dome.
For Marshallese, the Runit Dome is a disaster in more ways than one. First of all, it represents the painful history of U.S. nuclear testing. And second of all, it poses a grave danger as the concrete dome begins to age.