Elin O'Hara Slavik: Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography

Synopsis

"Bomb After Bomb," by Elin O'Hara Slavick, with a foreword by radical historian Howard Zinn, includes 48 color plates of Slavick's drawing series "Protesting Cartography: Places The United States Has Bombed." Working from military surveillance imagery, aerial photographs, battle plans, maps and mass media sources, using gouache, ink, watercolor, graphite and other media on paper, Slavick renders bombed sites as bleeding, poisoned, and destroyed, and as ceaseless targets. Each piece is accompanied by a title text including historical information--a heartbreaking mini-history lesson. Art historian Carol Mavor's poetic essay positions the project in a larger art historical, political, cinematic and photographic context, and Slavick's conversation with anthropologist Catherine Lutz illuminates the formal and conceptual processes behind her work, along with issues of propaganda, activism, history, the ethics of representation and the toxic residue of war.