ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Dark Archive is a solo exhibition by California-based artist elin o’Hara slavick. The title of the exhibition comes from the title for her forthcoming book about archives, photography, the intersection of technology, destruction and image-making, scientific research and discovery as a means of producing extraordinary photographs, and, as the artist states, “how violence and ruin are at the root of everything, even sometimes arresting beauty”.

The project is a continuation of two major series - Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography and After Hiroshima. Dark Archive focuses on and utilizes the Caltech Archive to demonstrate how Caltech was a significant site for the production of weapons of mass destruction, among many other things. The detonators for Little Boy and Fat Man, the A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were, in part, developed at Caltech. Many Caltech scientists worked for the Manhattan Project - Robert Oppenheimer, Robert Christy and Robert Bacher.

The exhibition includes collages on archival Sky Atlas photographs using Caltech materials only, 528 chemical drawings of nuclear tests on outdated paper (there have been 528 atmospheric/above-ground nuclear tests in total), cyanotypes of objects in the Caltech archives, and a 3D printed sculpture of a bottle melted from the heat of the A-bomb from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

The exhibition includes selections from the Caltech work, as well as selections from After Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima, Bomb After Bomb and other works related to the nuclear, radiation, the archive, photography and survival. 

About the Artist

elin o’Hara slavick is a California-based artist who has exhibited her work internationally and is the author of Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography, with a foreword by Howard Zinn and essay by Carol Mavor, After Hiroshima, with an essay by James Elkins, a chapbook of surrealist poetry Cameramouth, and Holding History In Our Hand for the 75th commemoration of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. She is a curator, critic, and activist, and is currently Artist-in-Residence at University of California, Irvine, until 2024. She was a Professor of Visual Art, Theory and Practice at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 27 years. The artist received her MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BA from Sarah Lawrence College.

IMPORTANT DATES

Exhibition on View
September 2 - October 8, 2022
GOCA Downtown, 121 S. Tejon St., Colo Springs, 80903, Plaza of the Rockies, suite 100.

Gallery Hours |
First Fridays, 1 - 8 p.m.
First Saturdays,1 - 6 p.m.
and by appointment

EVENTS

@Ent Center for the Arts
Visiting Artists & Critics Lecture
September 1, 2022, 6:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Chapman Recital Hall, Ent Center for the Arts
5225 N. Nevada Ave, Colo Springs, 80918

@GOCA Downtown
First Friday Art Walk & Opening Event
September 2, 5:00 - 8:00 p.m.
GOCA Downtown, 121 S. Tejon St., Colo Springs, 80903
First Friday Art Walk - Arts Month
Friday, October 7, 5:00 - 8:00 p.m.
GOCA Downtown, 121 S. Tejon St., Colo Springs, 80903
No registration needed for downtown events