The University Art Museum at NMSU is pleased to announce Specter, an immersive multimedia solo exhibition by artist Cara Despain. Through site-specific research-based processes, Despain explores nuclear weapons development — addressing the difficult history and legacy of territory expansion, industrialization and empire building in the U.S. Using sculptural and video-based installations created with found objects and archival film from the 1940-60s, Despain questions our cultural memory and underscores the irreversible environmental consequences and hidden psychological and microscopic health effects left in the wake of nuclear testing across the Southwest.

Specter was initially shown at The Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, FL, with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and curated by Leilani Lynch. In this iteration of the exhibition, Despain builds upon her new series of curio cabinets, adorned portals to her video installation “Test of Faith'', constructed to hold Depression Era glass dishware containing uranium oxide. This three-channel video, along with new paintings and drawings by Despain, presents hypnotic but horrific mirrored images of nuclear test clips pulled from declassified and digitized footage of atomic bomb experiments conducted at the Nevada Test Site, less than 150 miles from where Despain’s mother and grandmother were born and raised. This deeply beautiful but haunting video installation and accompanying body of work reveals a layered and complicated history poetically revealing the injustices delivered on rural communities across the Southwest.

The world's first nuclear explosion occurred in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, when a plutonium implosion device was tested at the Alamogordo Bombing Range, known as the Jornada del Muerto. “Trinity” (the code name for this detonation) was said to have a nuclear “fall-out” zone of 150+ miles, affecting the entire ecosystem, including all the immediate inhabitants of the region, but it also ultimately affected the entire globe forever. Specter will form the centerpiece and backdrop for a series of events happening in the region including juried exhibitions, curatorial projects, and a series of collaborative panels, lectures, and screenings, all mining the region's history of nuclear warfare, uranium extraction and pollution, climate change, and the effects of nuclear radiation across the Southwest. This exhibition runs concurrently with shows at the Las Cruces Branigan Cultural Center and The El Paso Museum of Art, both which tackle the environmental, biological, mental and physical effects of nuclear development across our rural communities of the US.