BIO:

elin o’Hara slavick is Artist-In-Residence at the University of California, Irvine and has

exhibited internationally. Her work is included in many collections, including the Queens

Museum, The National Library of France, The Library of Congress, the Nasher Museum, and the

Art Institute of Chicago. She is Professor Emerita, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and

was the Huntington Research and Art Fellow at Caltech in 2022. Author of two

monographs, Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography and After Hiroshima, and a chapbook of

surrealist poetry, Camermouth, her writings and images have been featured in The New

York Times, Los Angeles Times, FOAM, San Francisco Chronicle, Asia-Pacific Journal,

and Photo-Eye, among other publications. She is also a curator, critic, poet, and activist.

Started in 1999, Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography (the artist’s first monograph,

Started in 1999, Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography (the artist’s first monograph,

CHARTA books, 2007, with a foreword by Howard Zinn), is a series of drawings of places the

United States has bombed. The ones on view were selected due to their atomic nature - from

nuclear tests in the U.S. and abroad to the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan - Little Boy

on Hiroshima and Fat Man on Nagasaki.

One common formal element is that each one begins with ink or watercolor dropped onto

wet paper like bloodstains on damp clothing. When it dries this becomes the foundation upon

which to tell a violent story. I use this ground of abstract swirling or bleeding to depict the way

bombs do not stay within their intended borders. Depleted uranium and chemical agents

contaminate the soil, traveling in water and currents of air for decades. Mines and unexploded

bombs lay in wait for unsuspecting victims who were not even alive during the war. Bombs lay

the groundwork for genocide, cancer, more war, terrorism, widows, orphans, and a vengeful

populace on all sides of conflict.

The drawings are relatively abstract to reach people who might otherwise turn away from

realistic depictions. People approach abstraction with fewer expectations and defenses. I chose

the aerial view to align myself, as an American, with the pilots dropping the bombs, even though

I would not drop them. As a photographer aware of the military’s use of the aerial view that

flight and photography provide, using the aerial view seems like the natural choice. I utilize

surveillance imagery, military sources and battle plans, photography and maps, much of which is

from an aerial perspective.

I chose drawing because of my ongoing struggle with the problematic nature of

photography. While the drawings are not photographs, they are photographic. Many of them are

drawn from photographic sources and most of them are from an aerial perspective that is

inherently photographic. I hope that if I labor on a series of drawings in which the artist’s hand is

visible, that people will work to understand them on a deeper and more complicated level than

they might when seeing a photograph. Inspired and informed by documentary photographs and

violent maps, I want to convey the unsignifiable, to offer a protest against meaningless, to do

something in the face of so much destruction.

I made 60 of these drawings and when they are all exhibited together, it is a dizzying

experience: history comes all mixed up together, Korea beside Germany, Hiroshima next to

Kosovo; utter disbelief and shame that “we” have bombed so many places and, yet the series can

never be completed. There is always another war.