Building 3, ROOM 100
November 20, 2009 to January 10, 2010
10:00 AM to 7:00 PM
Art Exhibition
Admission: Free, Open to public
Parking: Main Parking Lot
Be among the first to see this exhibition of new work by elin o'Hara slavick, curated by contemporary art historian Cary Levine.
Elin's work is a deeply moving and poetic meditation on a horrific historical event that everyone knows, but which is rapidly receding in our collective memory. The series does not take a definitive political position, but rather reminds us that this event is still ongoing, that its residues still remain and its magnitude still resonates in the contemporary world. Remarkably, though, elin has discovered a way to find beauty in such destruction - not as a way to redeem its enormity, but to reveal a glimmer of hope so badly needed in the world today.
Levine has selected 35 pieces from over 100 that include cyanotypes of A-bombed objects; large photograms of rubbings of A-bombed surfaces; black and white analog photographs of the hypocenter, bamboo groves and gravestones; digital color photographs of dandelions, an orphanage and a man washing his feet in a river that once ran red from blood; and a lonely autoradiograph - an almost black image made from a sheet of x-ray film exposed from the lingering radiation in an A-bombed object.
The process and problem of exposure is central to slavick's project. Countless Japanese people were exposed to the radiation of the atomic bomb. Slavick utilizes exposures to make visible the unseen, to reveal the denied or hidden results of our military campaigns and scientific studies, and to remember the dead from the living.
Opening reception Friday, November 20, 2009 from 6-9 pm with gallery talk at 7:30.
about elin
elin o’Hara slavick is a Distinguished Term Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she teaches studio art, theory and practice. Slavick has exhibited her work in Hong Kong, Canada, France, Italy, Scotland, England, Cuba, Argentina, the Netherlands and across the United States. She is the author of Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography, (Charta, 2007), with a foreword by historian Howard Zinn.
about Cary
Cary Levine is an Assistant Professor of Art History at UNC, Chapel Hill. He specializes in contemporary art and visual culture. He is writing a book on the work of Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy and Raymond Pettibon. Levine's research focuses on strategies of cultural politics in art and issues of subculture, gender, sexuality and popular culture. He is particularly interested in alternative modes of critique, including caricature, the grotesque, parody, regression, black humor, and the abject.
Levine has been an active art critic, writing for magazines such as Art in America and BOMB. He has written numerous essays for exhibition catalogues and also worked for three years in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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