Bombhead

×

Expand

Nancy Spero, “Bomb and Victims,” 1967

gouache and ink on paper (Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, gift of Keith Westergaard and Cordell Couillard ©Estate of Nancy Spero/SODRAC, Montreal/VAGA, New York, 2018)

Life in the nuclear age is the prevailing theme throughout Bombhead, on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery until June 17. “Everybody forgot to be afraid,” says guest curator John O’Brian, alarmed by how desensitized people have become about the threat of nuclear war. “Except artists,” he continues. “Artists pay attention.”

Conceived to complement the gallery’s premier show, The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg – Japanese artist Takashi Murakami is also drawn to nuclear imagery – Bombhead is a collection of drawings, paintings and photographs drawn primarily from the gallery’s own collection.

×

Expand

Harold Edgerton, “Atomic Bomb Explosion before 1952,” 1952

silver gelatin print (Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, gift of Angela and David Feldman, the Menkes Family, Marc and Alex Muzzo, Tory Ross, the Rose Baum-Sommerman Family, Shabin and Nadir Mohamed)

O’Brian has arranged the works into four categories: Bomb, Fear, Protest and Document. Atomic Bomb Explosion by American engineer Harold Edgerton sets the tone. Photographed milliseconds before the actual blast, the pre-explosion bubble looks like a piece of rotten fruit or maybe a death head. It’s a haunting and frightful introduction to the rest of the show.

×

Expand

Carel Moiseiwitsch, “Untitled (Four Black Jets),” 1992

lithograph on paper (Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, gift of Mr. Milton Woensdregt)

Barbara Todd fashions an image of a coffin out of men’s suits in Overlay, while David Hockney abandons his sunny Los Angeles pool paintings for a nuclear explosion in Picture of a Landscape. Carel Moiseiwitsch’s piece, Untitled (Four Black Jets), speaks of unleashed power. Robert Rauschenberg, meanwhile, crudely fashions a mushroom-shaped cloud out of a piece of handmade paper.

×

Expand

Roy Kiyooka, “Stonedgloves,” 1970

silver gelatin print (Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, purchased with funds from the Vancouver Foundation and private donors)

Other than Roy Kiyooka’s photo series, Stonedgloves, which evokes the aftermath of a nuclear strike, Bombhead’s photographs are largely matters of record, depicting test sites and protests, but devoid of human suffering. That’s left to pieces like Nancy Spero’s Bomb and Victims, in which the now-familiar mushroom cloud is interlaced with broken bodies and mouths spewing blood.

Peacetime nuclear catastrophe is addressed in Octazilla, a two-and-a-half minute animation that shows, among other things, Fukushima-contaminated water snaking across the Pacific to Canada’s West Coast. The meltdown theme is repeated in Fukushima Half-Life by Erin Siddall, who filmed the cleanup.

Bombhead is a sobering exhibition: thoughtful and provocative, it also has moments of comic absurdity. Atomic postcards is a series of 150 postcards documenting some facet of nuclear weaponry. They fill a wall. Nothing says “wish you were here” better than a picture from the Los Alamos test site of Fat Man, the code name for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The show also looks at the nuclear age as depicted on record covers and in comics, civil defence manuals and paperbacks like The Day They H-Bombed Los Angeles. As with the postcards, the artifacts come from O’Brian’s personal collection. ■

Bombhead is on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery until June 17, 2018.