Cara Despain is an artist working in film and video, sound, sculpture, photography and installation addressing issues of land use/ownership, climate change, visualizing the Anthropocene and the persistent problematic dimensions of frontierism and their impacts on eco- and social systems. She was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and currently lives in Miami, Florida and works between the two. She holds a BFA from the University of Utah (2006). She was selected for a 2021 Harpo Foundation Award, and in 2021 she completed her first permanent public art commission for the Underline with Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places. She was also a finalist for the Creative Capital award in 2021, and participated in a fieldwork mentorship program with Southeast Arts and Fieldscreen International which was supported by a grant from the Australian Government. Her work is included in the Rubell Family and Scholl Collections, as well as the New Mexico State University Art Museum, State of Utah, Salt Lake County, Miami-Dade County and Miami International Airport art collections. Recent solo exhibitions include FROM DUST at the Southern Utah Museum of Art; In Memoriam: Carbon Paintings at the Kimball Art Center in Park City, Utah; Specter at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach and Specter New Mexico at New Mexico State University Art Museum in Las Cruces, NM. Despain’s work has been featured in numerous publications such as The Guardian, Hyperallergic.com, Thirdtext.org, The Art Newspaper, Sculpture Magazine.A short documentary about her and her work aired on Art Loft, WPBT and PBS and screened at the Miami International Film Festival (2016).
Cara Despain, ‘test still no. 3 (Teapot – Turk)’
Oil on canvas, 38×57”, 202
A blinding, panoptic flash followed by a rumbling shockwave and dome of heat that incinerated everything in its immediate vicinity introduced us to a power we had never before witnessed. Splitting the atom, until July 16th 1945, was exclusively the work of stars in space. Born of the push for global supremacy, nuclear fission and the creation of nuclear weapons and subsequently nuclear energy ushered us into a new era. Testing this power- both a flex and practical exercise to collect data – irrevocably changed the world forever and harmed many unconsenting people downwind. Using this power in war decimated entire cities and drew an instant and permanent line in the sand. This otherworldly technology imprinted every living thing on the planet with new radioisotopes, and has stood as the end-all, be-all status commodity of global (and extraterrestrial) power. The threat of nuclear war trumps all other tactical and strategic power plays the world over.
Using mirrored declassified archival footage of the atomic tests at the Nevada Test Site, Despain created the video installation, “test of faith” Rorschach’s of the most insidious type. Translated into the media and format of romantic landscape and religious depiction, these pieces are from a series of paintings and drawings she has been creating using stills from the video that that explore the celestial, otherworldly, nebulous quality of the heavens just outside our imagination. The darker reality of what these images come from is similarly the stuff of awesome, world changing power and science fiction. They are symmetrized snapshots of individual tests that rained radiation on Downwinders in Southwestern Utah, including the artists own family.
