Bootsy Holler: Contaminated

Bootsy Holler: Contaminated by Aline SmithsonDecember 10, 2024

©Bootsy Holler, Wanda – Radiation Poisoning, 2021-2022 6 x 7 x 2 inches Sculpture includes pigment prints and mat board Sits on a shelf

Wanda is a friend of the family. She became sick and qualified for the Compensation Act of $150,000. Plutonium-239 looks unnatural. Its bright fluorescent green poses a
radioactive danger to anyone working with it or living in the region. Its effects are slow and silent. The line of green here represents the depth of damage that this chemical has caused by seeping into the ground, the water, and peoples’ bodies over the years

A few weeks ago I had the great pleasure to attend two exhibitions at the Center for Creativity in Fort Collins, CO, presented by the Center for Fine Art Photography: Center Forward and A Thousand Beautiful Lies. A Thousand Beautiful Lies was curated by Hamidah Glasgow and features artwork by acclaimed artists Shayla Blatchford, Abbey Hepner, Bootsy Holler, Kei Ito, Patrick Nagatani, and Will Wilson.

This exhibition investigates the nuclear environmental and humanitarian legacy by exploring the agency and place of those directly affected by lasting impacts. Each artist explores issues of atomic legacy through lived experience and personal biographies affected by atomic legacies.

It’s a profound exhibition and the work of Bootsy Holler is a stand-out. CONTAMINATED is a layered historical exploration of the people affected by the secrets that the United States Government kept during the Manhattan Project, their subsequent illnesses, and the polluted land in eastern Washington State at the Hanford Nuclear site.

Bootsy Holler is an intuitive American artist who has worked in photography for 30 years. She is best known for her work as a portraitist, beginning with intimate depictions of herself and her friends at the center of Seattle’s pivotal music scene during the early 1990s and 2000s. These formative years working both ends of the lens cemented her style and methodology. Her empathic journalistic approach informed her work as she segued into a thriving commercial and editorial practice while at the same time always creating art. Her art revolves around family, memory, emotions, eco-feminism, and giving feelings to the inanimate.

Holler currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She has been recognized by the Society of Photographic Journalism and selected for Critical Mass Top 50 twice. Her art images have appeared in numerous publications like VOGUE, House & Garden, Aesthetica, Dodho, FOA, AAP Magazine, and Chinese Photographer Magazine. Her seminal work is in the permanent collection of the Grammy Museum. She has shown work at The Foley Gallery, in NYC, and in 2020 she was invited to exhibit at the Shanghai International Photo Festival. She has hung art at London Photo, Fotofever, Paris, The Griffin Museum of Photography, the California Museum of Photography, and The Center for Fine Art Photography. She was recently awarded Best-of-Show at the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, California. In 2019 she published her second monograph, TREASURES: objects I’ve known all my life. Bootsy is working on a new book on the Seattle Music Scene 1992-2008.

Instagram: @bootsyholler

©Bootsy Holler, Newspaper from CONTAMINATED It’s Atomic Bombs, 2021 Tabloid front page, 1945 12 x 15 inches/ 4 pages Geiger counter, Edition of 250

The front page of the Richland Villager paper, August 6th, 1945, was the day that the locals working at Hanford realized what they had been involved in creating. Fat Man, the plutonium bomb, was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9th, 1945. This decision was taken in response to Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. During World War II, Germany, Italy, and Japan, all led by fascist leaders, formed the Tripartite Pact. This development of a nuclear bomb was accelerated to try and catch up to the Germans, who were believed to be ahead of us in developing nuclear super bombs.

©Bootsy Holler, F – H – N – K Reactors, 2014 Columbia River, WA.

You are looking at the Columbia River Reach with nine cocooned reactors and Saddle Mountain in the background. Man has not changed this geographic area since the last Ice Age over 10,000 years ago. The Columbia River has the last 50 miles of wild river in the lower United States. Because the government owns this land, a dam that was planned to be built there was never installed. Yes, this land is undeniably polluted, yet the land of Hanford includes vast, continuous tracts of healthy, untouched, arid lands with many mammals, birds, and insects roaming about. In modern reality, it is hard to find nature that remains untouched by humans.

This is the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in 1940, where the B Reactor is located at White Bluffs on the Columbia River in Washington State. B reactor was the first of its kind at this scale and produced some of the first Plutonium used for warfare. I grew up 35 miles from Hanford in Richland, the closest town.

CONTAMINATED: Government Fallout

Contaminated is a layered exploration of the tens of thousands affected by radiation illnesses and the secrets kept at the Hanford Nuclear site. Hanford produced plutonium for the first nuclear bomb used during WWII. In 1942, my Grandpa Willie arrived on the land as one of the first surveyors and started working for the U.S. Government’s secret Manhattan Project. Later, my Grandpa, Dusty, was brought out by Dupont to work as a chemist. Contaminated is what has happened to the people and the land in southeastern Washington State. This is where I was born. This is where my family lived from 1942-2021.

An undertaking of this magnitude had never been attempted, and the records kept on employees’ safety years later were deemed insufficient. The U.S. Department of Labor now has the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA), which became effective in 2001. This Act now pays out employees and family survivors with specific illnesses related to working at the Hanford site.

My family, thousands of other employees, locals, and the land have all been affected. In the 1990s, after the Cold War, the Hanford reactors were decommissioned and left behind 53 million gallons of high-level, complicated mixed nuclear waste. To this day, the Hanford Site contains two-thirds of the United States’ radioactive waste – and is the most extensive environmental cleanup.

Contaminated is my experience growing up in this highly charged and secretive town and its impact on the people and land. Each unique piece is hand-built from family and friends’ stories, pictures, and declassified documents, surrounded by images of the land.

MAP-Hanford site, WA

MAP-Hanford Engineer Works detail

On the right, you see a small Washington state, which shows a red circle where the Hanford area is located. On the left side, the close-up map shows Red lines of the 625 square miles occupied by the US Government in 1942. The red blocks are buildings and reactors created between 1943 and 1945. B Reactor is now part of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park and is the Far Left Reactor next to the Columbia River.

Title: Dusty & Lou - Stomach Cancer, 2023 Size: 12.5 x 12.5 x 3 inches Medium: Stacked archival pigment prints, matboard, and pH adhesive Edition: Unique 1 of 2 +1AP Price: $2300

©Bootsy Holler, Dusty & Lou – Stomach Cancer, 2023 Sculpture: 12.5 x 12.5 x 3 inches Sculpture includes pigment prints and mat board

This is Lou and Dusty Rhoades, my grandparents. This image represents my Grandfather’s stomach ulcers after working at Hanford for 10 years. They were so bad that he stopped work and left the area but returned in the mid-1960s because my father and aunt were living in Richland with the grandkids. He later was diagnosed with stomach cancer. My father and my aunt applied for compensation in 2001 when the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA) started. The layers represent all the secrets and people affected by working at the Hanford site who may have the same illness.

©Bootsy Holler, NOTICE Sign, 2014 Hanford, WA

Title: Paul - Thyroid Cancer, 2016-2022 Size: 4 x 7 x 2 inches Medium: Stacked archival pigment prints on cotton rag, pH adhesive, burn-holes Edition: Unique 1 of 1 +1AP Price: $1000

©Bootsy Holler, Paul – Thyroid Cancer, 2016-2022 4 x 7 x 2 inches Sculpture includes pigment prints, and burn hole Sits on a shelf

This sculpture is of my grandfather, who was a chemist. He had thyroid and stomach cancer, both of which are on the list for the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA). Many years after his death – when the Act became available in 2001 – my sister and I encouraged my dad to apply for survivor benefits. My father and his sister were compensated in a lump sum payment of $150,000 for my Grandfather’s illnesses, which were most likely caused by working in the area. The layers represent all the secrets and people affected by working at the Hanford site who may have the same illness.

©Bootsy Holler, No Tresspassing, 2015 Hanford, WA

©Bootsy Holler, Julia – Brain Cancer, 2022-2023 6 1/4 x 8 3/4 x 2 inches Framed Print size – 20 x 16 inches Sculpture includes pigment prints Sits on a shelf

This is Julia, representing one of my dad’s best friends, Chet. Chet died of Brain Cancer. He was a brilliant engineer. His wife was able to apply for survivor benefits and was also able to get reimbursed for some of the doctor and hospital bills they paid, so she received 300,000 in total. I decided to use a woman to balance the group, seeing that hundreds of women also worked out at Hanford in the 1940s.

©Bootsy Holler, Wild Poppies, 2014 Hanford, WA

©Bootsy Holler, Jack – Classified, 2016-2022 6 x 8 x 2 inches Sculpture includes pigment prints, ink stamp, and button w/ thread Sits on a shelf

My father became assistant manager for the safety operations at Hanford during the 1980s; he worked for the Department of Energy for 21 years. He was never able to talk about his work, and rarely was I able to visit his office in the Federal building in Richland. Part of his job was deciding which documents should be Declassified. Many of the papers he remembers keeping Classified were likely evidence of the nuclear testing events that led to his own father’s stomach and thyroid cancer.

©Bootsy Holler, Portrait of a Tumble Weed, 2014 Richland, WA

Title: John - Blood Cancer, 2023-2024 Size: 17.5 x 12.5 x 2 inches Medium: Stacked archival pigment prints, matboard, and pH adhesive Edition: Unique 1 of 2 +1AP Price: $2500

©Bootsy Holler,John – Blood Cancer, 2023-2024 17.5 x 12.5 x 2 inches Sculpture includes pigment prints and mat board

John was a brilliant geoscientist who researched the movement of radioactive particles through groundwater under Hanford. He worked for Battelle NW Labs and received top honors in science from both Battelle and DOE. John was about 15 years younger than my father, and I see him as another wave of workers now focused on cleanup that will unfortunately fall ill. John passed away in 2021 from a rare form of leukemia (Blastic Plasmacytoid Dendritic Cell Neoplasm). I met John when he married my best friend from high school. He was a friendly, talkative, athletic person who loved climbing mountains. John’s wife got survivor benefits from the Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA). This is a found image I’m using to represent John and his love of climbing.

©Bootsy Holler, Dried Flowers, 2014 Hanford, WA

Title: Ruby & Maud - Uterine Cancer, 2023 Size: 12.5 x 12.5 x 3 inches Medium: Stacked archival pigment prints, matboard, and pH adhesive Edition: Unique 1 of 2 +1AP Price: $2300

©Bootsy Holler, Ruby & Maud – Uterine cancer, 2023 12.5 x 12.5 x 3 inches Sculpture includes pigment prints and mat board

My maternal grandmother, Ruby, died in 1978 in Richland, WA. she was very ill throughout my childhood, and we were never quite sure where her cancer started, but the thought was in her uterus, and then it made its way up into her liver. I made this piece to represent Ruby & Maud and all the women who may have been diagnosed with uterine cancer.

Title: Sara - Lung Cancer, 2023 Size: 12.5 x 12.5 x 3 inches Medium: Stacked archival pigment prints, matboard, and pH adhesive Edition: Unique 1 of 2 +1AP Price: $2400

This is my Aunt Sara, my dad’s sister. If I remember correctly, she worked at the Federal Building in Human Resources. She applied for the Compensation Act after getting lung cancer, but she didn’t qualify because she had smoked cigarettes. She passed away in 2016.