Opera Obscura: Mary Kavanagh
Vernon Public Art Gallery, Vernon, BC - To Oct 7
For the past 30 years, multimedia visual artist and University of Lethbridge professor of art Mary Kavanagh has focused her research-based practice on the effects of human behaviour on the natural landscape. These impositions, which include nuclear colonialism, industrial extraction and militarism, have taken her to remote conflict zones across North America, Australia, Europe and Japan, both through residencies and military embeds. Her most recent project, though no less rigorous, could be seen as an inversion.
For Opera Obscura, Kavanagh took possession of approximately 2,000 recently deaccessioned books from the University of Lethbridge Library. (These books, it should be said, are the result of the university’s annual collection review and cover a range of disciplines and languages.) From there, Kavanagh hand-inked each book individually and arranged them on the floor in a dense gridded field. Though the inking of these books could be seen as a unifying gesture, it is only an attempt at one, for in many cases the gilded titles, embossed surfaces, library markings and traces of wear can still be seen, despite their blackening.
Accompanying the floor grid is a series of photographs, where framed pictures of individually hand-inked books are displayed in gridded formation on a nearby wall. In some instances, we see only the covers of these books; in others, an open spread. It is an effective juxtaposition, having both the wall and the floor assemblage, with the former approximating both preface and index to the more monumental latter—an Ozymandias-like monumentalization that, in the words of the gallery press release, speaks to “the slow erosion of the material record, the institutions entrusted with its keeping and the accelerating forces that threaten both.”
Closing reception Oct 6, 6–8pm
