Michael Ast

“KINSEY” portfolio in the works featured on Phosmag:

KINSEY at Phosmag

“Kinsey is an ongoing series of hand-pulled photo etchings and photographs made at an abandoned, pre-Prohibition whiskey distillery and industrial warehouse park. The sight lies within a 10-mile emergency planning zone of the Limerick Nuclear Generation Facility in Limerick, Pennsylvania. I’m drawn to the dichotomy of the century-old, bygone facilities, and those relentlessly churning in the immediate distance.

The industrial park, with all its ephemeral detail of desertion, has intimations of destruction, chaos and ominous occurrences. From decayed, imploding rooftops, Limerick’s cooling towers are seen billowing out steam over old neighborhoods and new suburban developments. Imagination turns frail upon such viewing from the grounds of ruin.

Historically, I choose to understand little about the environment’s transitions and decline. Instead, I’m acting on a consciousness taunted by harrowing evidence of neglect, to form images from foreboding thoughts. In that sense, Kinsey has little to do with documenting a place, and more with illustrating human anxiety in the wake of intangible record, hypothetical detritus, and utilities as far reaching as apocalyptic possibility.”