Atomic Artists

Meet Patrick Nagatani and Andree Tracey, artists of the simulacrum, of the final ironic snapshot, of the last surprised blink before nuclear annihilation.

Nagatani and Tracey, whose recent works, “Nuclear Horizons,” are on view at the Koplin Gallery, have built their reputations on collaborations that fuse painting, photography, installation and performance into a single event, acted out, as it were, for a 20-inch-by-24-inch Polaroid camera.

Typically, their works combine a painted backdrop by Tracey, props by Nagatani, including life-sized photos, real objects suspended from monofilament fishing line and the artists themselves. In nearly every case, the focus of each carefully staged illusion is on lonely individuals trapped by apathy, curiosity or trivial banality at the instant their worlds are blown away.

“Many of the people in the work seem blase,” says Tracey, who has worked with Nagatani since 1983. “When you live under the threat so long, that’s how it is. Their expressions are just deadpan.”

In “Jornada del Muerto” (The Dead Man’s Journey), Japanese tourists--”the first people to be nuked,” says Nagatani--photograph the blast at an old nuclear test site. In a series titled “Radioactive Inactive Portraits,” an expressionless old woman watches doomsday on her TV screen, while a real mushroom billows outside her window.

The end of time robs their subjects of everything: redemption, tragedy, even grief. “We are not even sad about it,” says Nagatani, who today spends his time photographing the ironies of New Mexico--nuclear tests sites, warhead factories, irradiated rivers.

“I hiked a couple of miles to some ancient Hopi ruins,” he adds. “I think people in past times were more in touch with nature. They could see how they brought the end of their culture upon themselves. We don’t have a sense of that yet.”