This performance and sculpture, The Venus of Tularosa, is an autobiographical journey that intertwines metaphors from Roman mythology with the geological and historical essence of the Tularosa Basin where I was conceived. In geological terms, a basin is a convergence of tributaries not flowing toward the ocean, where rain either pools or seeps into the earth, here the erosion of alabaster sediments in Lake Lucero leaving behind that form the gypsum dunes of the White Sands. In this work, White Sands symbolizes a contract for life a parental union. My Mother is the Basin, a grounding force, while my Father is the air, with the creative fluid of water giving life to his seeds, visualized as gypsum crystals scattered across the landscape that is the Mother.
The Tularosa Basin also bears the scars of history as the site of the atomic blast test at the Trinity Site and extensive weaponry development at the White Sands Missile Range, where my parents met while serving in the U.S. Army. The Father is the antagonist, this militaristic culture, with its disregard for ecology, frames desecration as progress. In my view, wars, poverty, pollution, and the industrial misuse of economic resources are forms of cannibalism selfishness society I refuse to pass on to the next generation.
To symbolize a more liberated, authentic culture, the piece reflects the castration of the Father's line. This is embodied in the sculpted male genitalia, carved from the mineral source of the gypsum crystals at White Sands the very location of their origin. These genitals are a gesture to create a smarter, more conscious world rooted in love, a concept tied to the Roman goddess Venus, who represents love in this project. Love is created by casting the Father's genitalia into Lake Lucero at White Sands, where they dissolve into gypsum crystals, becoming part of the landscape that is the Mother. Just as Saturn castrated his father Caelus (the sky) and cast him into the sea to create Venus, my own symbolic castration honors Venus and my conception.
The performance begins in Kane, Pennsylvania, where my father was conceived, and traces a bicycle journey following the tributaries from the Tionesta Creek down to the Mississippi River diverting up the Arkansas River following the Canadian River to Ute Lake and heading off into the Tularosa Basin casting an apparition of my father, the air (Caelus). This journey serves as a detox, an apperceptive path to primordial peace. In the Basin, I will harvest new mediums, shaping the stone carved from the alabaster block I sculpted a testament to creation born from love and connection.