Cut from Liquid to Snake

Thornton’s film is formed around several voices – from cold to melancholic, to anxious – all at textural odds with each other. An entry point to the work is the artist’s metaphorical use of the Higgs Boson. The voices range from a phone recording made during the Trump election, to an eyewitness account of the immediate aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, and an intimate and distressed encounter between the artist and her partner discussing the Higgs and the difference between thought and language. Interwoven into this new work is Thornton’s complex emotional response to her own family history. Both the artist’s father and grandfather (unbeknownst to each other at the time) were engineers in the Manhattan Project, and it was Thornton’s father who screwed the last bolt into the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A complex legacy that has preoccupied the artist and her work in an ongoing way.