Gina Pugliese

Tag: Uranium Mine

  • The Moniker Monk of Jeffery City, Wyoming

    A Day Well Spent With Byron Seeley of Monk King Bird Pottery

    Inside Monk King Bird Pottery

    I left Lander, Wyoming at the end of August, running away from another Fremont County winter. Slowly making my way to Albuquerque, I visited Byron T. Seeley, proprietor of Monk King Bird Pottery. You can read about him, his shop, and Jeffery City in the article I wrote for Southwest Contemporary.

    Byron Seeley outside of his shop and studio.

    Here’s a small excerpt:

    Despite local interest in him as an artist and muse, internet searches provide scant documentation of Seeley beyond some travel blog posts and YouTube videos, including one where he takes “pot shots”—shooting his work with a gun. You also won’t find much information about Jeffery City, the former uranium mining town in Central Wyoming that boomed in the 1950s and busted in the 1980s, holding onto a paltry population of twenty-two. 

    Seeley shares a work-in-progress “primordial soup dish.”

    Sometimes passersby mistake Seeley’s shop for a restaurant since one of his signs reads “Home of the Primordial Soup Dish.” The dish, in fact, is a plate he makes using the same multi-clay technique as his mugs. “They’re my Moby Dick,” he jokes, admitting that he has none for sale due to the difficulty of stripping the surface layer and polishing the clay with steel wool without puncturing it.   

    Pondering the mascots and monikers surrounding Seeley—cowboy, mad potter, jailbird, abstinent monk, and muse—he strikes me as best represented by a tumbleweed–blown into one dusty Western town after the next, attracting interest and curiosity. In a similar vein, Seeley reminds me of the Dude from The Big Lebowski (1998), which opens with the song “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” following one of the sagebrush before introducing us to the film’s protagonist, a Gen-X hippy with a zen-like level of chill. While Seeley’s equanimity makes him guru-like, and perhaps also fails to shield him from the hyperbolic chaos and evil of the world according to the Coen brothers, he certainly doesn’t share the Dude’s lazy lack of production. And, you can’t placate him with a white Russian. 

    Read the full article here. Check out a full list of my publications here.

  • Land Art in a Wyoming Uranium Mine Ghost Town

    Hyperlink and Land Report Collective Members Install Work in Shirley Basin, Wyoming

    Photo by Donald Fodness of a hand-drawn map of the Shirley Basin ghost town, noting the placement of a few artworks. The “cow” refers to a dead cow found on the property.

    Find my latest art review for Southwest Contemporary, where I witnessed Theresa Anderson, Tobias Fike, Alicia Ordal, and Julie Puma get ready for an exhibition in remote Wyoming.

    Photo by Donald Fodness of work by David Lawrence Jones

    Here’s an excerpt:

    Sitting forgotten on an unmarked county road on the East side of Highway 487, you probably won’t find Shirley Basin, Wyoming, a uranium mine ghost town founded nearly seventy years ago. Its remote coordinates place it beyond unimpeded prairie hills, thirty miles north of Medicine Bow and sixty-seven miles south of Casper. If discovered, your reward is an eyeful of unhurriedly toppling structures, letting you witness over three decades of ongoing decay and abandonment.

    Photo by Tobias Fike of work by Summer Ventis

    As Hyperlink artists Theresa Anderson, Alicia Ordal, and Julie Puma erected their mixed-media sculptures in the only copse of still-standing trailers, the town blossomed under returned human interest.

    These artists traveled from Denver to participate in Re-Activate, a group show in collaboration with the Land Report Collective, which shares Hyperlink’s mission to meaningfully unite artists with various communities. Including geographically dispersed members from Colorado, Georgia, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Washington, Wyoming, and more, these collectives also seek to connect creatives across physical and digital boundaries and barriers.

    Photo by Gina Pugliese

    On my own unguided treasure hunt for art, I found a small, windowless white building with an attached cylindrical metal tower, I trepidatiously tip-toed through the open door next to Patrick Kikut’s Snowman Hospice and Wellness billboard (2020), with a snowman advertising ice cream in Laramie, Wyoming. Although I wasn’t trespassing, I felt like an intruder needing a hazmat suit to explore the depths of this miniature Chernobyl. Yet no uranium was mined and no nuclear reactors exploded in this spot.

    Inside were tall boxes with switches, dials, and gauges–clunky technology from a bygone telecommunications era. A disorderly vomit of binders and files spilled across the floor. Above me hung Daisy McGowan’s Biopsychosocial (all works 2023 unless otherwise noted), a disco ball, which, at night, scatters luminescent confetti onto an uninviting dance floor.

    Photo by Gina Pugliese

    Their gusto made me wish that I, too, was an artist invited to visually convey my perverse fascination with a place still bearing the scars of economic, ecological, and industrial devastation. Instead, I shared their productive curiosity about Shirley Basin and their excitement for an exhibition that compellingly blurs the distinction between art and detritus.

    Photo by Tobias Fike of work by Daisy McGowan

    Check out the full article and find a list of all of my publications here.

    Photo by Julie Puma of work by Alicia Ordal