VANISHING
ARTIST
Elin Slavick
elin o’Hara slavick is a Professor of Art at UNC, Chapel Hill. Slavick has exhibited her work internationally. Her work is held in many collections, including the Queens Museum, The National Library of France, The Library of Congress and the Art Institute of Chicago. Slavick is the author of two monographs – Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography and After Hiroshima. She has authored a chapbook of surrealist poetry, Cameramouth and an artist book, Holding History in Our Hand. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, FOAM, San Francisco Chronicle, Asia-Pacific Journal, and Photo-Eye. She is also a curator, critic and activist.
COUNTRY
USA
PROJECT
After Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima
I make cyanotypes, autoradiographs and contact prints of rubbings of A-Bombed and irradiated surfaces in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima in an attempt to make the invisible (radiation) visible. Radiation never really vanishes but it does vanish people and towns and landscapes through disease, destruction and death.
MEDIUM
Silver Gelatin Print
Lingering Radiation – Lingering Radiation is an autoradiograph, a silver gelatin contact print of a piece of x-ray film exposed by the lingering radiation in a fragment of an A-bombed tree from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum Archive. I placed the fragment on the x-ray film for 10 days. It is part of the project/monograph, After Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima.
Fukushima Persimmon Tree Heavy with Contaminated Fruit – This Fukushima Persimmon tree is heavy with contaminated fruit in an orchard in a town that has been “vanished” – evacuated and abandoned due to high levels of radiation. The fruit can not be safely eaten by humans and will vanish into the ground when it falls, or be digested by nearby animals.
Hiroshima Dead Flowers – This is a cyanotype of dead flowers from an A-Bombed tree in Hiroshima. It looks like a constellation, planets, a cloud of light or dust, an explosion, bullet holes.
THIS Gallery acknowledges that it is situated on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples–Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations.
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