Meridel Rubenstein: Critical Mass

CRITICAL MASS

MERIDEL RUBENSTEIN

Meridel Rubenstein making Fat Man with Edith, Bradbury Science Museum, Los Alamos, NM, 1992

1226 Flagman Way Santa Fe, NM 87505 505.995.0012 containertc.org info@containertc.org twitter.com/containertc instagram.com/container_turnercarroll Copyright © 2023 [CONTAINER] All rights reserved

Design: Marcia Reifman Photo credits: Robert Reck and Marcia Reifman All artwork and creative content copyright © 2023 Meridel Rubenstein. All rights reserved “After the Pow-Wow (an excerpt)” copyright © 1982 Harold Littlebird. Used by permission “The Big Shell” copyright © 1993 Edmund J. Ladd Used by permission Poem copyright © 1993 Ellen Zweig

Critical Mass 1989-93 The term “critical mass” means the smallest amount of fissionable material that, when amassed, will sustain a self-supporting chain reaction. Critical Mass is a collaborative photo/text/video installation by Meridel Rubenstein and Ellen Zweig, with technical assistance by Steina and Woody Vasulka. The project takes as its subject the worlds of scientists and Native Americans as they intersected at the home of Edith Warner during the making of the first atomic bomb in 1944 in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Cloud/Hand with Nuclear Trigger, palladium print, 19 x 23” unframed, edition of 10

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Archimedes Device, 1993, palladium print study for lithograph with palladium leaf and powdered pigment, edition of 3, from They Spoke to the Angels, fabricated by 21 Steps, Albuquerque, NM.

Most photo works are made using a 19th century, hand coated, palladium process from enlarged negatives, and contact printed using a UV light source or the sun. They are often mounted in hand designed shaped steel frames, and sometimes stamped with text. Most are one of a kind, although some are limited editions. These are the last large pieces with palladium and steel Meridel Rubenstein is going to make of this work. Single images can be ordered as archival pigment prints, and a few are available as single palladium prints.

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Photo Works from Critical Mass 1989-93

In 1989, photographer Meridel Rubenstein and performance artist/poet (now video artist) Ellen Zweig, received an NEA Inter-Arts grant to create the installation Critical Mass, with technical assistance by Steina and Woody Vasulka. The New Mexico Museum of Art gave institutional support for the exhibition that premiered in November 1993 in Santa Fe and then traveled for 3 years with stops including the MIT List Center, Cambridge and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.

Recently a downsized exhibition, less two major video installations, has traveled to the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, NM, July 21August 16, 2023 and to the Amarillo Museum of Art, Texas, September 16-December 3, 2023.

Presented here are Meridel Rubenstein’s photo works and the collaborative artists’ book, They Spoke to the Angels, with Ellen Zweig’s poetic text and one video with Steina. Several studies for a 1995 piece, Oppenheimer’s Chair, commissioned by the first SITE Santa Fe International Biennial, are also included.

We, Meridel and Ellen, have brought photography, video, and text together to examine the forces of domesticity and history that led to the bomb’s creation. Our biggest concerns were the impact of large historic events on ordinary people as well as bringing mythic historical characters down to human size with their fallibilities and connection to place. Archimedes Chamber, about J. Robert Oppenheimer and in the collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art, is a 5 track video/photo installation that questions the roots of the notion of scientist as destroyer.

The Archimedes Device, we learn to use in early physics class to measure volume by displacing water, is an apt symbol for one world view replacing another. Here we celebrate indigenous knowledge as equal to the scientific. Archimedes late in life designed giant bronze mirrors to deflect the sun to burn invading Roman ships.

Meridel Rubenstein and Ellen Zweig Most of the works presented here are complex portraits. Some of the people we came to only know through historical records; others we were privileged to meet and to photograph, which allowed us to record their memories of Edith Warner, the Manhattan Project, and the many ways their lives were affected by both. Edith Warner’s nurturing teahouse on San Ildefonso Pueblo land drew Robert Oppenheimer to her backyard to build the atomic bomb. Her home was where scientist and Native Americans first met. When the arrival of the Manhattan Project closed down her tearoom, Oppenheimer asked Edith to serve dinners to the scientists. Her nurturing environment became the one off base place they could relax and meet their San Ildefonso Pueblo neighbors.

79 years later, the forces of nuclear destruction vanquishing domestic safe haven and the power of the Feminine, that these works evoke, are even greater. Since Albert Einstein created the Doomsday clock in 1947, we are now closest to midnight at 90 seconds.

It’s heartening that this work, that is 30 years old, is still relevant. It’s equally dismaying that after 30 years it’s still relevant. Deepest gratitude to Paul Barnes, Director of the CCA Cinema, for instigating this idea to exhibit this work as a necessary alternative to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer film. Gratitude as well to the Tia Collection for loaning The Meeting and Edith’s House, and to Tonya Turner Carroll for insisting that this work go on the road again.

Steina and Woody Vasulka, Meridel Rubenstein, and Ellen Zweig

Rubenstein, Vasulkas, Zweig Archimedes Chamber, 1991 photography, video, text, 12 x 12 x 12’, single edition Collection of the NM Museum of Art, Santa Fe

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This is a story of a house that stood detached, between the Pueblo Indian world and the Anglo - a house destined to play a part in the lives of the men and women who brought into being the atomic bomb.

Edith Warner from In the Shadow of Los Alamos, unpublished manuscript

Edith’s House, 1993, 59 x 55 x 2”, 9 palladium prints in shaped steel frame stamped with text below Tia Collection, available in Critical Mass portfolio, palladium print, 24 x 20”, edition of 2

Edith Warner came to New Mexico in 1922 at the age of thirty to recuperate from an illness. She fell in love with the Pajarito Plateau and returned there to live in 1928. She secured a job taking in mail and supplies off the chile line railroad for the Los Alamos Boys Ranch School. She had strong ties to the San Ildefonso Pueblo having been given a house on Pueblo land in which to live and work. Gradually she was able to renovate this wood house, which rested on the bank of the Rio Grande at Otowi Bridge, filling it with simple furniture, Pueblo pots, and Navajo rugs. She could see Black Mesa out her kitchen window and hear the river. To augment her income, she opened a tearoom selling cokes and her legendary chocolate cake. Later she took in guests. She shared her home with Tilano Montoya, a past governor of the Pueblo who assisted her in these occupations. Edith’s quiet Pennsylvanian Quaker demeanor, Tilano’s calm Pueblo style, and the peaceful and secluded location made the House at Otowi Bridge a sought-after refuge.

Surprise, Bewilderment, Shock, Undramatic and calm, I am home.

Ellen Zweig, 1993, from IF Archimedes

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Tilano’s Garden, 1993, 68 x 67 x 2”, 10 palladium prints in steel frame Collection of the New Mexico State University Art Museum, Las Cruces available in Critical Mass portfolio, palladium print, 24 x 20”, single edition

Tilano Montoya was in his sixties when he came to live with Edith Warner. Tilano, like Edith, was alone.

Even though he was active in Pueblo life, his wife had died in childbirth; he had lived in neighboring Spanish villages; and, as a young man, he had traveled to Europe with Bostock, the animal trainer, with four other dancers from the Pueblo. At Otowi he found a central place. His peripatetic life ended, except for trips to Santa Fe to sell the surplus vegetables from his prolific garden, to Los Alamos to dance for the scientists, and, of course, to the Pueblo to participate in ceremonial life.

Fat Man with Edith and Tilano, 1993 27.5 x 32” palladium print with steel frame 19 x 23” unframed, edition of 10

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Oppenheimer/Archimedes

Archimedes Device

Studies for Archimedes Chamber available in Critical Mass portfolio, palladium prints, 24 x 20”

J. Robert Oppenheimer came to New Mexico in 1922 also for his health. He and his brother Frank leased a house in the Pecos Valley and made many camping trips to the Pajarito Plateau. In 1937, he first stopped at Edith’s tearoom, brought his wife back in 1941, and in 1942, he brought General Leslie Groves. He remembered with fondness the tearoom, the chocolate cake, the magnificent scenery, and Edith Warner. It was here that he was able to fulfill his dream to bring together his two loves: physics and the desert.

Oppenheimer once wrote to a friend: “My two great loves are physics and desert country; it’s a pity they can’t be combined.”

During the war years Oppenheimer arranged for Edith Warner to serve weekend suppers at her home to help scientists escape the atmosphere of confinement and secrecy that oppressed their lives at the Lab. Thus, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Bethe, Bainbridge, and many others dined often at Edith Warner’s. Here their lives intersected with people from San Ildefonso Pueblo who helped with meals, worked in the garden, or dropped by to visit.

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The Manhattan Project, 1993, 9 palladium prints, 19 x 23”, in steel grid frame 60 x 72” Coke bottle that survived the first atomic blast with photo of Oppenheimer and Groves, barometer, Los Alamos/San Ildefonso Square Dance Club with register from the Maniac computer, Bradbury Museum casts of Oppenheimer and Groves, Fat Man with Edith, photo of Tilano, hand holding trinitite with photo of Oppenheimer, Pueblo lightning rod, WWII gas mask from France

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Coke bottle that survived the first atomic blast at Trinity, (changing from green to gold), 1992, palladium print, framed 24 x 30”, edition of 10

Niels Bohr, the Danish theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner, was one of the founding fathers of the quantum theory. The young Bohr, troubled by anxiety and doubt, turned to Soren Kierkegaard for help. In Either/Or, Kierkegaard examines the dilemma of double consciousness, the self-watching the self, and concludes that each individual must choose in a leap of faith from a multiplicity of possibilities.

In his theory of complementarity, Bohr insisted that two mutually contradictory abstractions could exist and complement each other without imposing limitations on each other. At Los Alamos, Bohr was regarded as a moral force, applying these principles to philosophical and ethical problems as well as scientific. He said: “the best we can say is always partial and incomplete, only by entertaining multiple and mutually limiting points of view, building up a composite picture, can we approach the real richness of the world.” There was a strong bond between Niels Bohr and Edith Warner. Philip Morrison has said that they were both “more philosophical” and had a “less brittle, urgent view than most of us.”

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Bohr’s Doubt, 1989/91, 80 x 66”, 12 palladium prints in steel frame with stamped text below, 24 x 20”, edition of 3

Bohr’s Doubt, Science, Paradox, Uncertainty Principle.

Meridel Rubenstein, 1993

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Three missiles: Flight/Force, Four Elements, and Physics/Faith, 81 x 30”, composed of four palladium prints in shaped steel frames, each stamped with title, installation dimensions 7 x 12’, single edition

Flight/Force

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Four Elements

Physics/Faith

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Edward Teller Blue Corn

Trinitite Gaming Tubes

In 1947, after the war, the army decided to build a new bridge that would go too close to Edith’s house and Tilano’s garden. Forced to move, their friends came to the rescue. The Pueblo donated the piece of land across the new highway and the scientists provided the funds for the building materials. Both groups met on the weekends to build the second house.

Pueblo women such as Isabel Atencio and Desiderio Sanchez returned during the week to re-plaster the scientist’s work.

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The Meeting #1, 1995, palladium prints, steel, single-channel video on a 4 minute loop, video assistance by Steina, single edition, Tia Collection

The Meeting consists of twenty portraits of people from San Ildefonso Pueblo and Manhattan Project physicists—who met at the home of Edith Warner during the making of the first atomic bomb—and twenty photographs of carefully selected objects of significance to each group. On the left are people from San Ildefonso Pueblo and the objects they selected from the collections of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture to represent their culture.

On the right are Manhattan Project physicists and the objects from the collections of the Bradbury Science Museum that are all related to the making of the atomic bomb.

The Meeting #2, 1995, 9 palladium prints, 19 x 23” each on steel shelves, 23” long with glass, single edition Single images available as archival pigment prints Pueblo Gaming tubes Jezebel reactor Pueblo pot Corn Hair Fat Man Maria Martinez pot with Awanyu Serpent, Hiroshima, (City of 7 Rivers) shortly after the Bomb dropped WWII Gas Mask

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HEIRS 1A Portion of Tall Necked Jar with Awanyu and Photograph of Hiroshima Shortly After the Bomb (Jar: MIAC; photo courtesy Gary DeWalt) – According to Polly Schoofsma, Awanu “inhabits springs and other underground waters. His coming is announced by blowing on a conch shell. He sends rain to those who lead good lives, and his horn is a symbol of his knowledge and supernatural powers. But as a fearsome, punitive force, he sends destructible flooding rains and earthquakes cleansing powers of destruction.”

– Hiroshima is the city of seven rivers.

1B Adrian Roybal – grandson of Cerlia Roybal who worked as a domestic for Edward Teller at the end of the war.

1C Gas Mask (1950s) (Bradbury/LANL)

1D Pueblo Lightning Stick – to bring rain

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2A Dirt scooped up 100 yards from ground zero (Trinity Test Site) by mathematician Stan Ulam (July 16, 1945) (Bradbury/LANL)

2B Fat Man (implosion bomb) with images of Edith, Tilano, a pueblo water jug, and the Otowi bridge crossing (Bradbury/LANL: Rubenstein; UNM Special Collections)

2C Trinitite from Ground Zero (Trinity Test Site) (Bradbury/LANL) – Intense heat of the Trinity test fused sand within a 100 yards of Ground Zero.

2D Priscilla Atencio, pregnant with her daughter Christine – mother of Adrian – daughter of Cerelia

3A Photographs of Hiroshima and a piece of molten glass from Nagasaki (August 6 & 9,1945)

3B Fermiac and hand holding Trinitite (1947) (Bradbury/LANL) – brass hand-operated computer invented by Enrico Fermi, used to trace the histories of neutron movements, making use of a computational technique known as the “Monte Carlo” method.

3C Rachel Fermi – granddaughter of Enrico Fermi, who built the first full-scale, chain-reacting uranium pile of the University of Chicago in 1942 – she is currently organizing an exhibition of historical photographs from all of the sites involved in the making of the first atomic bomb.

3D Leaflet dropped over Hiroshima (Bradbury/LANL) _ that says: “To the Japanese People: Get out of the cities immediately. The content of this paper is very important; you should read it very carefully. You the Japanese are now in a great crisis. We – America, Great Britain, and Russia _ have advised your military staff to end this useless war; however, they have ignored our recommendation. For this reason, Russia has declared war with Japan. America now has fearful atomic bombs which no one else has been able to make. and which have an effectiveness equal to the bombs carried by 2,000 very big B-29s.”

CRITICAL MASS

Heirs, 1993, 12 palladium prints in steel grid frame, 77 x 73 x 2”, each image 19 x 23”, single edition

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Center for Contemporary Arts, 2023

The Big Shell The elders tell us that in 1680 when the pueblos banded together and the revolt came, they chased the Spaniards out of the country, but the Zunis killed one of their priests and took one of their priests up the mountain with them. And then when Devargas returned they fought on the mountain side and there was a decisive battle because the Zunis were on top and the Spanish were approaching the mountain side and one of the things that happened was that the Tsu tekkan ne, the Big Shell Society, were asked to blow the conch shell, the Tsu lhan na, which pierced the hearts of the aggressors. Not literally in a sense of piercing with projectiles but with a sound, in other words they weakened the “bravery” of the people who were attacking the hillside and the day was won because they were never taken off of the mountain.

They allowed the Spaniards to come up after a certain length of battle. And that was it… So, it was always part of warfare that (the shell) was used. And it was never used out of curiosity…

That’s basically the last time it was ever used because the society that owned the shell is now not in existence… There’s always a thing about dangerous material like this because if you don’t know the ritual, know the right prayer, the right chants and use it, you do harm not only to yourself but to your community and to the world at large and so usually what happens is that they either destroy it or put it in the ground or put it in a rock cave or where ever they want to put it to let it disintegrate into the atmosphere. And then the knowledge of the use of the equipment, the use of the shell and the knowledge concerning warfare is long gone. And it’s dangerous, it’s a dangerous piece of equipment, it’s almost like radioactive material.

Edmund J. Ladd (Zuni Pueblo), Curator of Ethnology Laboratory of Anthropology/Museum of Indian Arts and Culture Santa Fe, New Mexico, June 1993

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Brains in Nature, 1993, corner shelf with conch shell, tree root, brain coral, sea sponge, and nuclear trigger used on nuclear submarine in the Bikini Islands for launching nuclear missile if red light came on, c. 1950’s, Positive and Negative Clouds on sides of corner shelf, palladium print

shelf 51 x 36 x 7”, shell 8 x 4 x 5” tree root 8 x 6 x 4”, coral 6 x 5 x 4” sponge 4 x 2 x 1.5”, nest 7 x 5 x 1” trigger 3 x 3 x 12”, clouds 20.38 x 25.25” each framed

The Big Shell, 4 palladium prints in steel frame, 48 x 55”, edition of 5, collection of John Shaeffer, President of the University of Arizona and author of The Ansel Adams Guide: Basic Techniques of Photography, Little Brown and Co.

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Tickling the Dragon’s Tail, 1993, palladium prints in steel frame, Lopo nuclear reactor, molten glass from Nagasaki, and Manhattan Project “y” stamp, 59.5 x 25” framed, single edition

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Laguna Pueblo After The Pow-Wow (an excerpt)

I tell him how it used to be in Paguate before the Jackpile Uranium mine opened, the way my mother remembers it She would say: “That’ s when there was still farming through the valley and on up the canyon; the peach trees and rows of corn, melon patches and fields of grain and wheat where the mine is now.

That was when it was still a long ways from the village.”

And how she said not too many Paguate men worked there yet, now it is an ugly scar just east of the village across the two-laned highway And the mill tailings are left uncovered, blown about by the winds, with no provisions for removal and no one in authority seems to care.

How the people were told to build the foundations of their new houses with the tailings and how they used this excess to line the roads to hold the dust down In the community buildings where some ceremonies are held, the dirt floor is mixed with these tailings.

Now there are more cases of cancer, birth defects and internal disorders in the elderly; and more up-dated statistics on how to get more uranium with modern equipment brought in by large oil companies like Exxon, Shell, Amoco.

The People are caught in a catch-22 They have to work in order to live, and the mine is there, the money keeps coming, and the people keep working under unhealthy and dangerous conditions; and so the songs will continue.

It’s not his fault I know, so I sip my coke and change the subject and we continue to talk about traveling but I will remember to sing for him also.

Anaconda Mine at Paguate in Laguna Pueblo, 1983, 17 x 14 x 4” and shelf with Geiger counter, sandbox with sand from mine, photos and Geiger counter with poem by Harold Littlebird After the Pow-Wow (an excerpt), in On Mountain’s Breath, Tooth of Time Books, New Mexico, published 1982, unpaginated, copyright Harold Littlebird

Harold Littlebird

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Oppenheimer’s Chair, 1995 photo, video, glass installation with 9 minute video projection loop 10 x 7 x 9’, single edition Tia Collection, Santa Fe, New Mexico

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Ghost House Studies from Oppenheimer’s Chair, 1995 with Chair, Snake Skin, Maile Suit, photo sandblasted on glass, painted steel, 16 x 11 x 3”, single edition

Joan’s Arc #1: (study from Oppenheimer’s Chair), 1995, triptych: each image 17 x 14”, photo silkscreen on paper and glass, sandblasted glass, in sandblasted Lucite frame 19.75 x 15.75”, edition of 12 produced at Anderson Ranch Art Center, Snowmass, Colorado

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Critical Mass portfolio, 1995, 8 palladium prints on 100% rag watercolor paper, 24 x 20”, edition of 5 in Irish linen case with 3 texts printed in palladium

They Spoke to the Angels, 1993, 2 page standing copper book with duo tone paper lithograph, with text by Ellen Zweig, 20 x 15”, edition of 12, closed, bi-metal book, four-sided, copper coated stainless steel litho plates, paper lithograph affixed, other images exposed directly on copper, fabricated by 21 Steps, Albuquerque, NM

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About Meridel Rubenstein Meridel Rubenstein began her professional career in the early 1970s, evolving from photographer of single photographic images to artist of extended photographic works, multi-media installations, and environmental social practice that focus on intersections of nature and culture in relationship to ecological and social imbalance. Threads of ancient myth and the status of nature during periods of war have been woven throughout her projects for decades.

Her most recent creative work runs in 2 parallel directions: artwork and social practice. The Boat is a Circle, in collaboration with Joanne Grune-Yanoff, an American artist in Sweden, takes the Mesopotamia Flood story that predates the biblical Noah’s Ark as a way to visualize the question of how to and, who and what will, survive our current environmental crisis? This work will be shown in 2024 in New Mexico and is a large scale installation with photography, video, and sculpture.

In 2011, Rubenstein initiated and is Project Director of the Eden in Iraq Wastewater Garden Project. This interdisciplinary water remediation project in the wetlands of Southern Iraq (thought to be a possible site of the historic Garden of Eden), uses art, design, environmental engineering, and wastewater to make a restorative garden for health, cultural heritage, and environmental education.

She has exhibited internationally in numerous gallery and museum exhibitions, including at the Louvre in Paris and Artists’ Space and MOMA in NYC. Permanent collections that house her work, include the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, the National Museum of American Art in Washington DC, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, Germany. In September 2023, Rubenstein received the Anonymous was A Woman Environmental Art Grant following numerous awards over 4+ decades including a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In October 2004, BELONGING: Los Alamos to Vietnam, Photo works and Installations, was published by St. Ann’s Press. This major monograph of twenty years of her work, includes texts by environmental writer Terry Tempest Williams, cultural theorist Elaine Scarry, and renowned art writers James Crump, Lucy Lippard, and art and cultural critic Rebecca Solnit. Solnit has written of Rubenstein, “A consummate maker of metaphors, an artist who can never talk about only one thing at a time, but speaks of things in relationship, of lives to landscapes, of corporeal location and homing in terms of labyrinths and minotaurs, of bombs in terms of other myths, of physicists in relationship to pueblos.”

Her second monograph, Eden Turned on its Side (University of New Mexico Art Museum, 2017), contains essays by Dr. Shawn Michelle Smith and Alan Weisman. Lucy R. Lippard, art writer, and cultural critic writes on the book jacket: Eden Turned on Its Side is a dazzling demonstration of the ways beauty (via inventive art and photography) can illuminate the earth’s most crucial issues, offering hope for a different world than the one we are barging into.

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About Ellen Zweig Ellen Zweig is a media artist based in New York City who creates videos and video installations. She started as a poet, and wishing to make her poetry oral, she became a performance artist. She and Meridel Rubenstein met at San Francisco State University in 1985, where Zweig was teaching in the Center for Experimental and Interdisciplinary Arts. They collaborated teaching image and text classes and loved this so decided to work together, receiving one of the last NEA Interarts grants to fund Critical Mass.

The Dinner, video play by Ellen Zweig

Zweig often works in China where she has created several series. She is currently working on the Hometown Project which includes interviews of Chinese and Americans discussing their concepts of “hometown.” Her feature-length documentary film, Heart Beat Ear Drum, about the artist and musician, Z’EV, has screened at film and music festivals in the US and Europe.

A vinyl record was produced in London in 2023 by the PhantomLimb label of her earliest audio works from the 1970s.

About the Vasulkas Steina and Woody Vasulka are pioneers who have contributed to the evolution of video art. The Vasulkas’ investigations into analog and digital processes and their development of electronic imaging tools, which began in the early 1970s, place them among the primary architects of an expressive electronic vocabulary of image-making. They chart the evolving formulation of a syntax of electronic imaging as they articulate a processual dialogue between artist and technology.

Steina was born Steinunn Briem Bjarnadottir The Meeting, video stills with Steina in 1940 in Iceland and was trained as a classical violinist. Woody Vasulka was born Bohuslav Vašulka in 1937 in Czechloslovakia and was trained in film. The Vasulkas met in Prague in the early 1960s, immigrated to the United States in 1965, and began their collaborative exploration of electronic media in 1969. In 1971, they co-founded The Kitchen, a major alternative exhibition and media arts center in New York City. From 1973 to 1979 the Vasulkas lived and worked in Buffalo, New York, where they were faculty members at the Center for Media Study, State University of New York. The Vasulkas have received numerous awards for their work in the media arts. They have broadcast and exhibited their collaborative works extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan.

They had a retrospective at Berg Contemporary, Iceland in 2018.

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Situating myself here, where I live, in New Mexico–– how, as a woman, can I make a work that illuminates the fissures?

In the Glass House Over a million photographic glass plates were made of the Civil War. At the end of the war, no one wanted them. They were forgotten, lost, sold to gardeners, not for the imagery but for the glass. In his Civil War series, filmmaker Ken Burns says: ‘In the years that followed Appomattox, the sun slowly burned the image of war from thousands of greenhouse glass panes.”

Sits a Glass Chair J. Robert Oppenheimer was the head of the Manhattan Project. I had been looking at a photograph I made of his Los Alamos director’s chair. We all sit in Oppenheimer’s chair.

It’s made of glass In White Sand The first atomic bomb was detonated at the Trinity Test Site near White Sands on July 16, 1945. I decided to mark this event and fifty years of cold war by making a reconstructive work.

With a Tree The atomic scientists thought they were creating a second sun at 5:29 in the morning in the New Mexico desert. The heat of the blast turned the sand into glass. A blast so bright, a blind woman saw its reflection 100 miles away. The tree reclaims the molten landscape.

And Armor A story my father told me when I was young keeps coming back. He once knew someone so sensitive, it was as if he didn’t have any skin. Everything touched him. Instead we have coverings that protect us––or do they. The armor is about our history of war. All that protets us is a glass house.

The Heart Beats at the Changing Image The armor shatters, the tree breathes, the sun burns, the snake sheds, I dance on glass.

Meridel Rubenstein, Oppenheimer’s Chair, 1995

by Ellen Zweig They Spoke to the Angels, 1993