On July 25, 1946, “Operation Crossroads” detonated “Baker,” the first underwater atomic bomb test, 909 feet under Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. The bomb forever altered the course of human events and yielded a horrific vision of the apocalypse as documented by more than 700 cameras on ships, on land, and in the air. Nearly half the world’s supply of film was at Bikini Atoll for these tests, making these explosions the most thoroughly photographed moment in history.

Conner selected 27 individual shots from declassified U.S. Government footage of this event from the National Archives to transform the images of nuclear holocaust into hypnotic abstraction. “ Whether in film, sculpture, photography or drawing, Bruce Conner has been a role model for younger artists for at least two generations,” says Michael Kohn, Conner’s dealer for the last 25 years and expert on his work. “The mesmerizing quality of the repetitive film edits in films like CROSSROADS is a direct influence on artists from Dennis Hopper to Christian Marclay.  And Conner’s polymathic approach to art making is discovered by each generation of new young artists.”