In the five-minute film Evan Tabak Atlas made about his father, shadows fall across a canvas and Harry Tabak talks about leaving room for accidents. Tabak has spent the past few years making work with glass and fire. He can choose what goes into the fire, but what comes out has a way of surprising him. He thinks of the pieces as “collaborations with fire.”
In Abba, for instance, irregular pieces of glass sit in a shallow cradle of wire mesh balanced on a frame of branches. The cut ends of the wood are still visible, and thinner branches crisscross beneath the glass. The structure holds everything in place, but the glass has a shape Tabak couldn’t have planned. He describes his part as feeding the fire its ingredients. When he calls the fire a collaborator, he’s giving it credit for the part of the sculpture he can only see once the fire has done its work.
Atlas had a similar serendipitous frame of mind when he made the film. The two hadn’t been planning it, and Atlas didn’t start with a fixed idea of how it ought to turn out. He shot enough footage that his father wondered how much he’d had to sift through to get to five minutes. The voiceover, on the other hand, took one try. “It’s just his voice recording, and it was actually his first take,” Atlas says. Tabak had no idea what his son would make of all that material. “I couldn’t have envisioned that,” he says.
At the family house in New Paltz, the walls are hung with work Tabak made decades ago about radioactive waste. Atlas grew up with the pieces. He knew a little about their origins, mostly in passing. “It was always there in front of me,” he says. “Maybe there was an element of blindness to it, seeing it every day.”
One drawing in particular got them talking. It was a black-and-white depiction of waste being dumped into the ocean, with fish and barrels. Atlas took the drawing and made an animation that brought it into color. It took him only a few minutes, Tabak recalls, and the effect was “just stunning.” Around the same time, a separate feature documentary about Tabak was prompting conversations about his art, his service in Vietnam, and his family’s experience of the Holocaust. The drawing gave father and son a place to start a project of their own.
Radioactive Art, the first volume of their graphic novel series The Radwaste Trilogy, goes back to the 1970s, when Tabak worked for a Brooklyn company that collected and disposed of radioactive waste from universities and research facilities. The job supplied the subject of his art for years. Atlas built the book around the conversations they had about it, working in drawings, newspaper clippings, and warning labels his father had kept. “I often felt like I was collaging,” he says. As Atlas asks questions on the page, he’s often learning the answers for the first time.
Tabak sees three phases in the work, which is how they arrived at a trilogy. The earliest pieces told a fairly explicit story about what he’d encountered on the job. He showed them at universities, including Harvard and Yale. Then he wanted to see what would happen if he let the images stand on their own. A later collaboration with his wife, the artist and author Nava Atlas, became a traveling exhibition.
In between, Tabak walked into Samuel Dorsky’s New York City gallery with a portfolio and slides. Dorsky liked what he saw. As Tabak remembers it, the dealer told him, “I’m not gonna be able to sell these, but I’ll give you a show.” A museum bought Buried for Posterity, a painting of large yellow waste drums, and more exhibitions followed.
After Tabak and Nava moved to New Paltz in 1985, he got to know Neil Trager, then the gallery director at SUNY New Paltz. When Trager told him the college was looking for someone to help fund a museum, Tabak suggested Dorsky. He remembers telling his former dealer that a museum bearing his name would be a wonderful legacy. Tabak likes to think he helped persuade him. For Atlas, who expects the relationship to figure in later volumes, it’s a part of the story with a tangible presence close to home.
Tabak has hundreds of glass pieces now, enough, by his estimate, to fill several museum shows. He hasn’t settled on a name for them, although he thinks “collaborations with fire” might do for an exhibition. The phrase came up again in conversation with his son. Tabak described himself as feeding the fire the ingredients and leaving it to do the creating. He started to say the results were mostly accidental, then corrected himself. “Not mostly,” he said. “Entirely accidental.”
