elin o'Hara slavick: Art + Science Competition Honorable Mention

elin o’Hara slavick: Art + Science Competition Honorable Mention by Jeanine Michna-BalesDecember 21, 2024

© elin o’Hara slavick, There Have Been 528 Atmospheric Nuclear Tests to Date, 528 photo-chemical drawings on outdated and fogged silver gelatin paper found in the abandoned Sky Atlas Darkroom at Caltech during a 16-week Huntington Art and Research fellowship, 2022, various sizes (5×7”, 8×10”, 8.5×11”, 11×14”, 16×20” and 20×24”).

Artist and educator elin O’Hara slavick is currently an Artist-in-Residence at the University of California, Irvine. In 2022, while she was the Huntington Research and Art Fellow at CalTech, she created the project There Have Been 528 Atmospheric Nuclear Tests to Date. Working from nuclear detonation test photographs that have been seared into her mind’s eye, she creates photo-chemical drawings on outdated and fogged silver gelatin paper. The process of physically drawing the shapes onto the photographic paper gives them an eerie, almost-melted feel as if they were a photograph that survived an actual detonation. The fluidity and gestural quality of the photographs give reference to automatic drawing, revealing tragedy through the subconscious.

© elin o’Hara Slavick, There Have Been 528 Atmospheric Nuclear Tests to Date, 528 photo-chemical drawings on outdated and fogged silver gelatin paper found in the abandoned Sky Atlas Darkroom at Caltech during a 16-week Huntington Art and Research fellowship, 2022, various sizes (5×7”, 8×10”, 8.5×11”, 11×14”, 16×20” and 20×24”).

During a 16-week Huntington Art and Research Fellowship at CalTech in 2022, I spent days in the archives looking through an irradiated lens for all things nuclear related. I was stunned by what I found and am currently working on a book about this experience – Dark Archive. I discovered several abandoned darkrooms, including the Sky Atlas darkroom, and I repurposed it to make silver gelatin prints from archival negatives and transparencies of nuclear tests, scientific data, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, cloud chambers and of scientists using image-making techniques to acquire knowledge for possible total annihilation. I found unopened boxes of outdated and fogged silver gelatin paper in the darkrooms and used them to make over 528 photo-chemical (developer, stop and fixer) drawings of above-ground nuclear tests. Some were done from memory of the quintessential mushroom cloud, and others in reference to Harold Edgerton’s spectacular rapatronic images and other historical photographs of the most photographed event in the history of humanity. The project has been exhibited twice in its entirety – at the University of Colorado Galleries of Contemporary Art in downtown Colorado Springs in 2022 and at Cerritos College in Norwalk, California in 2023. I exhibit them with each year marked on the wall and the number of tests done that year represented by the same number of prints – 1958 / 99 tests, 1960 / 3 tests etc. The project is also a 7-minute film of the same name, done in collaboration with my niece Madeleine Richardson, The film debuted at Yes We Cannibal gallery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 2024 as part of my solo show “Atmospheric Catharses.”

There are over 12,000 nuclear warheads in the world today, 90% belonging to the United States and Russia. Most of these nuclear bombs are 60 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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“Millions of people have suffered from radiation since Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Their bodies form part of the fabric of ecosystems where nuclear fallout deposited radioactive particles – whether from nuclear weapon testing, nuclear power accidents, or the production of materials used in both technologies. These exposures have led to deaths, illnesses, forced evacuations from homes and communities, continued habitation in radiologically contaminated landscapes, tainted food sources, and endless anxieties and emotional distress. The experiences of these ‘global hibakusha’ have been largely invisible to us because they happened primarily in colonial, post-colonial, or remote parts of our world, or to people with little political recourse. (Hibakusha is a Japanese word denoting a survivor of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

The most important thing we must do is to stop making more nuclear waste: we must abolish nuclear weapons and abandon nuclear power.”

– Robert A. Jacobs, Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha

elin o’Hara slavick is an Artist-in-Residence in the School of Public Health, University of California, Irvine (2022-25). She was a Professor of Studio Practice and Theory at UNC, Chapel Hill for 27 years. She has exhibited her work internationally, and it is held in many collections, including Queens Museum, National Library of France, Library of Congress, Nasher Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. She was represented by Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles. Slavick is the author of two monographs – Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography (with a foreword by Howard Zinn) and After Hiroshima (with an essay by James Elkins); a chapbook of surrealist poetry, Cameramouth; and Holding History in Our Hand for the 75^th commemoration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She has held artist residencies in Canada, France, the United States, Japan, and most recently at Caltech in Pasadena, California. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Images Magazine, FOAM, San Francisco Chronicle, Asia-Pacific Journal, among other publications. She is working on two books – Dark Archive and The Book of U.

Dark Archive, solo exhibition at University of Colorado Galleries of Contemporary Art, Colorado Springs, 2022; debut installation of There Have Been 528 Atmospheric Nuclear Tests to Date, in its entirety, along with selections from Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography; After Hiroshima; The Blur of Science (Sky Atlas) and other projects.

Atomic Index, solo exhibition at Cerritos College, Norwalk, California, 2023; installation of There Have Been 528 Atmospheric Nuclear Tests to Date, in its entirety, along with selections from Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography; After Hiroshima; The Blur of Science (Sky Atlas) and other projects.