Operation Upshot Knothole-Grable

W: 40" D: 1" H: 46"

Archival Inkjet Piezography Print

 2019

Entitled "Operation Upshot-Knothole: Grable" this print by Chicago-based artist Jan Pieter Fokkens offers a representation of an atomic test. Grable was a nuclear weapons test conducted by the United States as part of Operation Upshot-Knothole on May 25, 1953, in Area 5 of the Nevada Test Site. The test remains the only nuclear artillery shell ever actually fired in the U.S. nuclear weapons test program U.S. nuclear weapons test program.

Inspired by de-classified images of nuclear tests, contemporary computer compression algorithms and early non-representational art, Fokkens recreates images that exist at the verge of our imagination. Done completely by hand, each work is created with the use of custom algorithms that extract qualities such as pattern, form and color. Fokkens then draws these abstracted qualities with repetitive marks on photopaper.  In similar fashion as the “sanitized” and declassified documents, full of black outs and opaque cover up tape, that accompany these nuclear tests. The result is a reductionist, analogue interpretation of an unimaginable and obscured reality. 

Unframed. Edition of 10 + AP