The following is a “dream review” written as a visualization exercise for thesis class at ITP.  The facts and links are all true, the work is in progress, but the exhibition and its review are works of imagination and visualization.

If anyone is interested in making the exhibition a reality, let me know!

 

LACMA was illuminated with recent works by Peter Terezakis bringing discovery of some of the unseen forces which shape our world.

Mr. Terezakis has a long history of creating works of art which directs viewers toward issues affecting our biosphere.  From early work with threatened sea turtle habitat in Cozumel, the large-scale light installations of Heart Beats Light, and the site-specific performance-installations of Sacred Sky Sacred Earth, Terezakis’s trajectory has been that of increasing audience participation by shrinking the boundaries between the  implied largesse of consumerism and the impact of that thinking on the natural world.

Terezakis maintains that a tide of radioactive waste is inexorably drifting toward the western shore of the North American continent.  The government of Japan has responded to world-wide concern by criminalizing media coverage of clean-up efforts at the crippled nuclear reactors of Fukushima.  In keeping with its own actions criminalizing the 2010 media coverage of BP’s Gulf oil spill ($40,000 fines), the Obama administration has voiced support of Japan’s new laws and by extending the scope of existing anti-terrorism and secrecy acts¹.

In response to a climate of denial and obfuscation, the artist has created a series of sculptures simply titled “Sentinel” which detect nuclear power’s detritus on both monumental and personal scale.

My first view of the Sentinel sculptures was the museum’s courtyard installation.  The  grid of nine dark, slender vertical elements of glass and bronze brought to mind a somber, ordered Cycladic Burghers of Calais.

Designed to flash bright white pulses of light in response to detected occurrences of ionizing radiation, these minimalist instrument-objects evoke a morbid fascination: we know that we never want to see them illuminate.  We can imagine their action, but do not want to see them turn on as we will be helpless to do anything about their message.  Ironically the sculpture is completed in the mind’s eye living on in the viewer’s memory long after leaving the exhibition.

Leaving the Sentinels to mutely stand guard, the exhibition continued through entering  the west gallery.  In an otherwise dark expanse, against the far wall were a series of colored volumes, Terezakis’s signature “Healing Light” project.  This work represents nearly forty years of research with lifelong friend and collaborator Dr. Joseph Shapiro, O.D. 
Centered in each luminous volume was a reconstructed nineteenth-twentieth century experimental apparatus.  These instruments were fundamental to the discovery of naturally occurring and man-made radiation by key scientists from 1895 – 1905.

The exhibition’s  Acoustiguide provided descriptive context for these early hand-made tools as well as insight into the artist’s excitement at what was a golden age of discovery: “….this was when the energy and glue of  subatomic forces began to be understood and a new age for mankind began.”

Within the near-mystical atmosphere of the Violet room were white bean bag chairs (reminiscent of 60’s optimism).  On each chair was a virtual reality (VR) headset whose program was  eponymously titled, “See.”

Soon after putting my headset on I began to view green flashes of light while hearing something like white noise.   Minutes went by in moments as I tried to determine the scale of what I was experiencing.  Afterwards I found out that what I was hearing and seeing was not an animation of an imagined celestial activity.  

What I had been viewing were photons emitted in response to being struck by alpha particles from a tiny amount of decomposing radionuclides: in real-time!

The work’s title is a reference  to the description that Sir William Crookes gave when he first viewed radioactive decay through a microscope, “…the surface looks like a turbulent, luminous sea.”  Through participation in this installation, I experienced the wonder of his discovery first hand.

In the museum’s gift shop are miniature, wearable versions of the Sentinel sculptures which are equipped with the same radiation detection sensor and electronics as their larger counterparts.  These elegant works have been  designed and engineered by the artist with direction and support from mentor Eric Rosenthal, resident scientist at New York University’s renowned Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).

In the 1970s Mr. Terezakis invented a wearable LED pin and eventually created a line of jewelry which was featured in Mademoiselle, Interview, ID Design, and sold world-wide.
Like his original Mykro Dot jewelry, today’s wearable miniature Sentinel sculptures are also “at home on a jacket or blouse.”  What is different is that they monitor the air which we breathe, the rooms we enter, water we drink, and our food when shopping or dining.  

Like their much larger counterparts, I hope that they will always remain dark.

Terezakis continues to honor his artistic heritage and late mentor Billy Kluver, by promulgating an ethic of collaboration and process between artists, scientists, and engineers.  In this way communication and understanding between disciplines of knowledge become a method of self-discovery.  In many respects this exhibition is an artist’s work run full circle. It chronicles a  journey from a need to know, to discovery, exploration, and back to a need to share the results of this curiosity within a greater community.  Sharing the concerns of Russian Constructivists, Terezakis’s concerns are for a society on the edge of an uncertain tomorrow.

The exhibition will remain on display until midnight December 31st.

For more of this artist’s work, visit http://www.terezakis.com