Dust to Dust – Mary Kavanagh
Dust to Dust – Mary Kavanagh
Dust to Dust – Mary Kavanagh
Dust to Dust brings together works spanning different periods of my art practice – from Distillation: in her element (1998), a meditation on both the promise and the danger of scientific advancement, to Seven Skies of Maralinga (2024), an exploration of the paradox of place in the face of radioactive fallout. Included in the exhibition are a selection of studies made in the intervening years that reveal persistent preoccupations related to scale and proximity, contamination and containment, transcendence and terror, accretion, perception, and invisibility.
The entwined histories of art and science are seeded throughout.
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 and 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 and 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. Her work has been the subject of over 50 critical reviews and essays, and has been featured in publications including War Art in Canada: A Critical History (Art Canada Institute, 2021); Through Post-Atomic Eyes (MQUP, 2020); The Bomb in the Wilderness: Photography and the Nuclear Era in Canada (UBCP, 2020), and Voices: Artists on Art (Lammerich / Carr-Harris, 2017). 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