LILY PRILLINGER

Homewrecker, 2002
Oil on canvas
Series of eight (24" x 30") paintings

To be struck by an image is to have one's mind clubbed into a fleeting dumbness. Images of disasters as they unfold incomprehensibly mortify as they expose frailty. Visual accounts of calamity at the very least are striking. In a moment, even a mass-produced photograph of an event can inspire such grief and fascination that ugliness and beauty are laced together in untraceable knots.

When I first saw photographs of a 1954 atomic bomb blast test on some houses at Yucca Flats, Nevada, my eyes were sucked into the velocity of the imagery. Many times I have revisited this procession of images, drawn not only to their violent perplexity, but also my own reaction. As a painter, I have attempted to enact and examine my own experience of this event by slowly recreating these images in sequence. The Homewrecker series is the result of this project.

These images of a house as it burns into obsolescence seem to demonstrate the obliteration of the 'typical' American home. The bomb blast test was designed to measure the effects of an atomic bomb on civilians and their properties. The bombed area, constructed as a diagnostic device, represented a suburb complete with two frame houses and store dummies as occupants of the house. Perhaps this test was intended to simply gauge loss. It is unlikely that it intended to provoke metaphorical interpretation.

The iconic significance of the house, however, is hard to pass up. The implications of constructing a house (or implied 'home') as the Test Site, as a literal proxy for human life, suggest loaded scenarios. As I examine the sequence of moments in which the house crumples into ash, the implication is that its human occupants would similarly disintegrate. I do not just see a house shattering to pieces - it is almost as if I am a witness to death itself. As a viewer, I begin to sense the house as a personification of the human body, tearing apart from its own burning limbs in a complete nervous meltdown of its own life.

Concurrently, as a figurative painter I am struck by the sequence of actual events revealed by this bomb test. As I began to paint them, these images began to chart a conceptual mutation. The house - a coherent representational figure - gradually plunged into eventual, terminal abstraction. Each image detours from its own structure until it is barely recognizable as a form of itself. It is this formlessness of violence as it blooms like shrapnel across the horizon that harnesses the immediacy of an abstract moment. Perhaps, conceptually 'the object' - as demonstrated by a house engulfed by its own fragile rage - eventually buckles too, against the weight of the world.