Today we’d like to introduce you to Elin O’Hara Slavick.
Hi Elin O’Hara, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I am the youngest of seven, four of us artists. Art is my bread and butter, the blood coursing through my body, what gets me up in the morning and keeps me sane. I received my BA at Sarah Lawrence College in 1988, focused on poetry, visual art and film studies. I earned my MFA in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1992 where I read a lot of psychoanalytic and feminist theory and made feminist work about my/her/our bodies and sexuality, identity, eroticism and politics. I took a job as a tenure-track professor of studio art, theory and practice at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where I built the old school darkroom – bringing the Art Department into the 20th century at the end of it. I retired 27 years later as a Distinguished Full Tenured Professor. I taught Body Imaging, Queer, Collaborative, and Curatorial Strategies, Collage, Conceptual Photography, Drawing, and other courses. I am now the first Artist-in-Residence in the School of Public Health at UC, Irvine and was the Huntington Art and Research Fellow at Caltech in Pasadena, spring 2022. I was represented by Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles for several years before they closed. I have lived and worked in Japan, France, Canada, Germany, Italy and across the U.S.
My work has explored issues of labor, global politics, war, memorials, the body, feminism, the familial, and since 2008, radiation, atomic power and weapons, exposure, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima through the use of cyanotypes, photography, installation, archival materials and collage. I am thrilled that the work I made at Caltech will be part of the 2024 Getty Museum’s PST (Pacific Standard Time) exhibition on Caltech’s campus.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
As one of my favorite musicians, Billy Bragg, croons, “you have to learn to take the crunchy with the smoothy”. No one can be happy all of the time. Life is a struggle half of the time and a visual feast of pleasure the other half. As a politically motivated feminist artist, it is not easy to be “successful in the art world”. However, I have come to realize and participate in many different art worlds and try to create my own definition and practice of success. The fact that I am able to make art practically every day – from posting many gorgeous photographs on social media and making collages to sending out boxes of my work to exhibitions internationally – is a privilege and job of my own making. Academia is not an easy place to be as an artist, activist, and passionate educator interested in pedagogical theory and utopian possibilities. Because of the extreme divisions in our country, the classroom is a fraught place to be. At the end of my time at UNC Chapel Hill, I was criticized by right-wing and left-wing students. I felt as if I could not move, could not speak about anything of consequence without “offending or triggering” someone. As Sarah Schulman says, “criticism is not abuse.” I process and make art about everything, including the emotional and professional turmoil I suffer. Art transforms pain and struggles into a visually rich discourse with others.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I made 528 chemical drawings – developer and fixer on outdated silver gelatin photography paper – of the 528 atmospheric/above-ground nuclear tests during my fellowship at Caltech. The paper had been left in the abandoned darkroom that I managed to get working again. Working in the Caltech Archives, I discovered that the detonators for Little Boy and Fat Man, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were developed at Caltech. My first monograph, Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography, with a foreword by Howard Zinn, is a series of paintings of the places the U.S. has bombed. My second monograph, After Hiroshima, with an essay by James Elkins, is a book of Cyanotypes of A-bombed artifacts from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum Archive and silver gelatin contact prints of rubbings of A-bombed surfaces, like trees and buildings, that survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. I am perhaps best known for these monographs of my work.
I am currently working on a book, Dark Archive, that originated in the Caltech Archives, but will include archival materials from other archives as well. Revealing images and experiments that are kept hidden while exposing the fact that image-production itself is a form of knowledge-acquisition is my current preoccupation. I am hyper, driven, focused and truly enthusiastic about too many things – as excited about an Ottolenghi recipe and the William Kentridge exhibition at the Broad as I am about my solo show of 580 works at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs Contemporary Art Gallery this fall and my kids’ happiness. I love to write, to curate, to cook, to walk the dog, weed the garden, travel the world and read every type of book. I published a chapbook of surrealist poetry in Dublin, Ireland, Cameramouth. I am most proud of the fact that I never stay still, always moving towards making the world more beautiful.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
You can make beautiful work about terrible things. Beauty can be subversive. Art is creative, not destructive. There is no such thing as failure, only research.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.elinoharaslavick.com
- Instagram: elinohara
- Facebook: Elin OHara Slavick
- Youtube: https://youtu.be/MiFUHl2hwnA
Image Credits
Elin O’Hara Slavick
