Queer Monuments at the Atlantis of Lake Mead at Sunrise
My new series of radically-small, temporary, time-traveling monuments mark queer futures at the young ruins of St. Thomas at sunrise. The work explores conceptual placemaking at sites tied to the elements of power and extraction in the Las Vegas valley and surrounding Mojave Desert.
St. Thomas, Nevada is located in the Lake Mead NRA. Described locally as Nevada’s “Atlantis,” the town of St. Thomas was drowned by Lake Mead when the Hoover Dam was built on the Colorado River in the 1930s. Long submerged under 60 feet of water, it is now entirely exposed due to droughts caused by climate change and land use impacts.
These tiny monuments mark a queer relationship to ruins, seeking portals to Queer Renewal within the liminal states of time created by the failed, abandoned, and discarded.
