LISI RASKIN

Mt. Disappointment

May 8 - June 20, 2010

There are sixteen decommissioned Nike/Hercules missile sites surrounding Los Angeles. During the early years of the cold war (1950 - 1974), the Nike/Hercules missile sites, in tandem with NORAD early warning sites, were the mainstay of the United States Military's defensive strike strategy. In essence, the Nike/Hercules missiles remained on 24-hour ready-alert in order to thwart incoming bomber attacks. Since their decommissioning, the L.A. area Nike/Hercules sites have gone through a multitude of different functions. It is the physical residue of these functions, an interest in obsolete military weaponry, and the way entropy shapes post-use sites that galvanized my decision to use these locations as the backdrop of this project. An example of this predictable yet absurd use-cycle is the area of land now known as the Long Beach Airport. In 1960, the Nike missile site was know as L.A.-40 and today, the exact location of the missile battery is an office park.

The research phase of “Mt. Disappointment” entails an extended trip to Southern California to gather footage and photographs of the Nike/Hercules sites. Over the past ten years, I have explored the nuclear powered sublime on a first hand basis and used my findings in the field to develop artwork. This interest has provoked excursions to malignant locations like former East German Atomic Bunkers and the Swedish Space Corporation’s Esrange Launch Site in the Arctic Circle. In addition to these specifically charged locations, I have spent countless hours gazing at empty lots, waiting in fast food drive-thru lines, and observing the world from various vehicles at high speeds and altitudes. Within these approximate figure/ground relationships I imagine assortments of devastation while attempting to remain in contact with the logical and illogical elements of a catastrophic event. This part of my practice has informed the making of artworks that simultaneously quell and stimulate my fear of technological progress and pathology. In terms of praxis, this fear-based psychic space has opened up certain correlations between art and science. These correlations are the ones that I subconsciously conjure and willfully sublimate through artistic means that hover near the place where the technological and magical coexist, for example, in the act of blowing up one's hometown with a web-based simulation of a nuclear attack.