Dust to Dust – Mary Kavanagh
Dust to Dust – Mary Kavanagh
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 9, 7pm – 9pm
Dust to Dust brings together works spanning different periods – from Distillation: in her element (1998) to Seven Skies of Maralinga (2024). The entwined histories of art and science are seeded throughout.
Emerging from my decades-long research on nuclear culture, radiological inheritance, and scarred landscapes – during which I approached the subject of the atomic bomb from multiple perspectives – I have returned to long-standing preoccupations rooted in perception at the edge of visibility. Imaging skies began with pointing my camera straight up. Rayleigh scattering of sunlight into sublime blues and changing hues gave way to the contested skies of surveillance, atmospheric contamination, space colonization, and modern aerial warfare. Terror from the air – especially in an era in which the main targets of warfare are the very conditions necessary to sustain life – is taken up by cultural theorist, Peter Sloterdijk, who states “the air is no longer innocent.” Intimately tied to environmental degration and climate decline, the air as commons enters a state of precarity.
Referencing the gilded heavens of pre-Enlightenment painting and mosaics, the romantic sublime of 19th century cloud photographs, scientific diagrams and data, this work pulls from an eclectic range of representations to consider sky’s essence, its permeability and fragility, and the role it plays as a barometer for a changing planet.
Mary Kavanagh is a visual artist and a Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Lethbridge. She is a Board of Governors Research Chair awarded for her work examining nuclear colonialism and scarred lands translated through moving image, photographic, archival, and spatial practices. Her artwork is exhibited in Canada and internationally. It encompasses a range of media that respond to conceptual, political, and felt imperatives.
Artist and research residencies have taken her to remote locations across the globe, including active military bases, weapons testing and research facilities, and sites of mining extraction and remediation. Immersion in places with complex or difficult histories has resulted in projects that explore access to publicly held lands, institutions, and data. She has recently returned from Maralinga Tjarutja in South Australia, site of the British Nuclear Testing Program (1952-1963) where she toured the lingering devastation wrought by atomic testing in the desert outback.
Kavanagh’s work has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She was Principal Investigator of a SSHRC Insight Grant focused on the Trinity atomic bomb test site in New Mexico, a project that continues to unfold. Kavanagh is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Academy of Arts and Humanities.
Date:November 9th, 2024 - January 11th, 2025
Location:Casa - Main Gallery
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