Photograph of a detail of Roberto Chabet's installation, Waiting in line to see the Trinity Site, exhibited under the same title at Paseo Gallery, SM Megamall from 24 March - 14 April 2009.

Excerpt from the exhibition notes written by Ronald Achacoso:

'At 5:29:45 a.m. on July 16, 1945 a 19 kiloton explosion ushered the world into the atomic age. A mushroom cloud, an archetypal spectre of fearful symmetry, one of the most sublime image of awe in the 20th century, loomed for the first time. The first nuclear explosion was christened ‘Trinity’ by Robert Oppenheimer, chief architect of the clandestine project, in an obscure reference to the poetry of John Donne. After witnessing the event he recalled a passage from the Bhagavad Gita and lamented that he ‘has become death, the destroyer of worlds’.

60 years onward a tourist’s camera captures an endless line of vehicles parked along a lonely desert highway belonging to curious onlookers on a road trip to this historic landmark, the original ground zero. The photograph incidentally captures the irony and ambiguity of a defining moment of the modern era – when man aspired for godlike stature, split the atom and melted the desert sands into green glass – now reduced to an object of detached fascination – a tourist’s pilgrimage site to what once gave shape to a generation’s collective anxiety and hidden desire.

‘Waiting in line to see the Trinity Site’ is Roberto Chabet’s nostalgic send off, a long goodbye to the previous century. It includes the innocuous snapshot, a peripheral element in his installation set amidst the familiar array of objects and assemblages that make up the artist’s terse but distinct visual language: painted plywood panels, clipboards, neon signs and bracketed shelves. On the clipboard are inserted pages from a book that feature interior shots of cathedral domes that allude to the architectural structure of heaven and reflects man’s celestial aspirations. Perhaps too the pictures approximate a frozen view from that moment of detonation on ground zero.'

'Ensconced between a V-shaped shelf are a series of overlapping discs painted in primary colours. The contraption is an analogous reference to the celestial spheres of Andreas Cellarius’ ‘The Harmonica Macrocosmica’, a 17th century stellar atlas that maps out the then known cosmologies of its time, primarily of Ptolemy, Copernicus and Brahe.'

'Neon arrow signs nostalgically hark to a bygone era and act as cryptic signposts that cross references the diverse elements and cue us into the quiet poetry of his perplexing constructs and the understated romanticist streak behind the conceptualist trappings. In its perpetual stargazing and the Promethean quest to intuit the secrets of the universe buried under the rubble of time and forgetfulness, the exhibition is an alchemical synthesis of myth, memory, history from which we can behold the magnificent and the marvellous veiled behind the humdrum of everyday life.'