Image credit: Mary Kavanagh, Trinity Equivalent, [Yucca, White Sands National Park, New Mexico; Observatory, White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico], 2019.
03.02.2019 | 04.28.2019
DAUGHTERS OF URANIUM | MARY KAVANAGH
Mary Kavanagh’s solo exhibition, Daughters of Uranium, considers the legacies of nuclear production, and the encoding of militarized conflict on the body. Derived from the chemical sciences, the term "daughters of uranium" refers to the decay chain of naturally occurring uranium (U-235 being the crucial element for sustaining a nuclear chain reaction) while evoking generations born into an uncertain future.
Cultural anthropologist, Peter C. van Wyck describes the exhibition as a territorial archive in which “the archive as site shifts towards the archive as practice,” and one that “calls into question temporal and topographical notions of scale and proximity.” Using materials that are literally radioactive such as glass coloured with uranium oxide, or trinitite samples formed during the first atomic bomb blast, Kavanagh’s work radically challenges notions of contamination and containment, invisibility, violence, exposure and evidence. In her catalogue essay, “A Radioactive Domestic,” Jayne Wilkinson offers a feminist reading of the exhibition, noting that Kavanagh structures the Nuclear as a totalizing concept rather than a specific event or period. By not relying on typical nuclear signifiers in broad circulation such as photographs of enduring mushroom clouds, “Kavanagh’s approach is unique in the visual records of the atomic era…. [her] work frames a critique of militarism and military aesthetics through encounter and touch in order to understand how war impacts the body through generational histories.”
Daughters of Uranium (2019-2020) was presented first at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery before travelling to the Founders’ Gallery at The Military Museums in Calgary, and the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery.
In conjunction with her immersive exhibition, a publication brings together documentation of Kavanagh’s installations, photographs, archives and field work, with contributions from a distinguished group of contemporary curators and scholars: Christina Cuthbertson, Lindsey Sharman, Peter C. van Wyck, Jayne Wilkinson.
Co-curated by Christina Cuthbertson and Lindsey Sharman.
Publication Information
Mary Kavanagh: Daughters of Uranium
2020
Co-published by Southern Alberta Art Gallery, the University of Calgary Founders' Gallery at The Military Museums, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery
Authors: Christina Cuthbertson, Lindsey Sharman, Jayne Wilkinson, Peter C. van Wyck
Hardcover (30 cm x 23.5cm) 160 pages
$40
Purchase the publication through Shop at SAAG
View more information on the Book Launch for Mary Kavanagh: Daughters of Uranium held on December 10, 2020
Mary Kavanagh is an artist and Professor in the Department of Art, University of Lethbridge, Canada. Kavanagh’s work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions across Canada and abroad, and she has contributed to numerous publications including Through Post-Atomic Eyes (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2020) and Prefix Photo 32: Occupying Forces (Toronto, 2015). Her multi-disciplinary work is focused on embodiment, archives and evidence, and engages multiple and varied visual strategies. She has documented sites of nuclear significance in Canada, the United States (Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Alaska), and Japan. Her work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Kavanagh’s participation in artist residency programs includes the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Santa Fe Art Institute, and the Canadian Forces Artists Program. She is an advisory member of the Atomic Photographers Guild, and an Associate Member of the Centre for Documentary Studies, School of Image Arts, Ryerson University, Toronto. In 2017 Kavanagh received a multi-year SSHRC Insight Grant for her project “Atomic Tourist: Trinity” which examines nuclear anxiety in the 21st century. She was recently awarded a Board of Governors Research Chair (Tier I in Fine Arts) and began her five-year appointment in 2020.
Documentation photography | Jaime Vedres
