Atomic Time; Pure Science and Seduction

Format is approximately 10.25 inches by 12 inches. 96 pages, Illustrations (color). This was published on the occasion of Atomic Time: Pure Science and Seduction, an exhibition of work by Jim Sanborn, organized by Jonathan P. Binstock at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., November 1, 2003, to January 26, 2004. Foreword by Jacquelyn Days Serwer. Essay on Tickling the Dragon's Tail by Howard Morland and essay on The Nature of Secrets--The Secrets of Nature by Barbara London, and Materials, Process, and Meaning, An Interview with Jim Sanborn by Milena Kalinovska. There are sections of Plates entitled Critical Assembly and Atomic Time. There are sections on Exhibition History, Selected Bibliography, Exhibition Checklist and About the Contributors. Herbert James Sanborn, Jr. (born November 14, 1945 in Washington, D.C.) is an American sculptor. He is best known for creating the encrypted Kryptos sculpture at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. He has created sculptural works for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Themes in his work have included "making the invisible visible", with many sculptures focusing on topics such as magnetism, the coriolis effect, secret messages, and mysteries of atomic reactions. In Atomic Time: Pure Science and Seduction, he presented a "life-size re-creation of a hypothetical atomic lab." The exhibit featured the sculpture Critical Assembly, a three-dimensional representation of the components of an atomic bomb. Jacquelyn Days Serwer is an American art historian and curator. A specialist in American art and African American art, she is currently the Chief Curator of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture. In 1999 she became the Chief Curator of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Serwer served as the Chief Curator for the Corcoran Gallery of Art for six years. Howard Morland (born September 14, 1942) is an American journalist and activist against nuclear weapons who, in 1979, became famous for apparently discovering the "secret" of the hydrogen bomb (the Teller-Ulam design) and publishing it after a lengthy censorship attempt by the Department of Energy (United States v. The Progressive). Barbara London is a US curator and writer specializing in new media and sound art. She is best known for founding the video collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Milena Kalinovska (born 1948) is a curator of visual arts and art educator. She has Czech and Russian ancestry, and is a triple national with British, American and Czech citizenship. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in its second year, 1985. She was director of public programs and education at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC from 2004-2015 and she became director of the modern and contemporary art collection at the National Gallery in Prague in 2015. In Atomic Time, sculptor, photographer and conceptual artist Jim Sanborn has combined his longstanding interests in invisible natural forces and secrecy, pairing together two separate but related projects: a series of photographs called Atomic Time and images of his latest work, the room-sized installation Critical Assembly. Inspired by the Manhattan Project, the first nuclear weapons program at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Critical Assembly is a representation of what was once a secret site of government-sponsored research. The installation includes actual examples of electronic instruments, hardware, furniture, tools and materials from the Los Alamos Laboratory of the 1940s, 50s and 60s, which Sanborn acquired from retirees living in New Mexico who worked on the Project. The photographs in the Atomic Series are distinguished by an intense cobalt blue-like color, similar to the true color of radioactivity. Half of the series is of abstract images made by exposing sheet film to actual pieces of uranium ore; the ot.…