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Free with registration | Facebook event
The Universities Art Association of Canada and the SFU School for the Contemporary Arts invite you to attend a virtual book launch and roundtable for two new publications, Through Post-Atomic Eyes, edited by Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian, and The Bomb in the Wilderness by John O’Brian (UBC Press, 2020).
Join John O’Brian, Claudette Lauzon, Lindsey A. Freeman, and Erin Siddall for a roundtable conversation on a wide-ranging set of topics, from Canada’s nuclear footprint to weapons proliferation and climate change. The event will include a live Q+A moderated by Svitlana Matviyenko.
Confronting cultural fallout from the dawn of the nuclear age, Through Post-Atomic Eyes addresses the myriad iterations of nuclear threat and their visual legacy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whether in the iconic black-and-white photograph of a mushroom cloud rising over Nagasaki in 1945 or in the steady stream of real-time video documenting the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, atomic culture - and our understanding of it - is inextricably constructed by the visual. This book takes the image as its starting point to address the visual inheritance of atomic anxieties; the intersection of photography, nuclear industries, and military technocultures; and the complex temporality of nuclear technologies. Contemporary artists contribute lens-based works that explore the consequences of the nuclear, and its afterlives, in the Anthropocene.
Claudette Lauzon is assistant professor of contemporary art history at Simon Fraser University. John O'Brian is professor emeritus of art history and faculty associate at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia.