ARTICULATIONS
Book Launch | Mary Kavanagh | Daughters of Uranium
Thursday, December 10 | 5-6:30 PM
FREE | VIRTUAL
Artist Mary Kavanagh, and authors Christina Cuthbertson, Lindsey Sharman, Jayne Wilkinson, Peter C. van Wyck
The Southern Alberta Art Gallery is pleased to host an online launch of Mary Kavanagh’s new publication DAUGHTERS OF URANIUM, co-hosted by the University of Calgary Founders' Gallery at The Military Museums and the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery.
Please join us over zoom for a conversation with the artist and authors of the publication. Authors will read excerpts from their essays.
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 the typical nuclear signifiers including 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.”
Kavanagh’s sustained examination of this complex and veiled history culminated in her immersive exhibition, DAUGHTERS OF URANIUM (2019-2020). In conjunction with the exhibition this publication brings together documentation of Kavanagh’s installations, projections, archives and field work, with contributions from a distinguished group of contemporary curators and scholars.
This event is hosted online over zoom. Guests will receive a 20% discount on the book (regular price $40). Please email info@saag.ca to inquire about purchasing the publication.
Christina Cuthbertson is an independent curator and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. For over a decade, she held various curatorial roles at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, prior to being curator-in-residence at the Banff International Curatorial Institute in 2018, and curator-in-residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn in 2019. Her current research interests include affect, embodiment and power structures within and beyond the boundaries of the museum.
Lindsey V. Sharman is a curator at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton and adjunct professor in the Department of Art at the University of Calgary. From 2012 to 2018 she was curator of the Founders’ Gallery at the Military Museums in Calgary, and in that role, she exhibited many contemporary projects that examined human conflict and war. Her primary areas of research include politically and socially engaged art practice.
Jayne Wilkinson is Editor-in-Chief at Canadian Art, Toronto. Her interdisciplinary research practice examines surveillance culture, environmental politics, security, and representation, with a focus on contemporary art and photo-based practices. A recent project considers the visuality of oceanic networks through the material metaphors of digital infrastructure, forthcoming in a collection of essays titled Energy Cultures.
Peter C. van Wyck is Professor of Communication and Media Studies, and Co-Director of the Media History Research Centre at Concordia University in Montréal. His research and writing arise from multidisciplinary training in forestry, ecological sciences, environmental and cultural studies, philosophy, and media studies. He has published and lectured widely on environmental themes including deep ecology, the predicaments of the Anthropocene, and nuclear history and culture.
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
