Casa Main Gallery, Lethbridge, Alberta
9 November 2024 – 11 January 2025
Dust to Dust brings together works spanning different periods, from Distillation: in her element (1998) to Seven Skies of Maralinga (2024). The entwined histories of art and science are seeded throughout.
Emerging from her decades-long research on nuclear culture, radiological inheritance, and scarred lands, Mary Kavanagh returns to long-standing preoccupations with perception at the edge of visibility. Her exploration of skies began with pointing her camera straight up. Rayleigh scattering of sunlight into sublime blues and changing hues gave way to the contested skies of surveillance, atmospheric contamination, space colonization, and modern aerial warfare. Intimately tied to environmental degradation, climate decline, and economies of scale, the air as a commons now exists in a state of precarity.
In addition to a series of drawings on paper, the exhibition includes works make with genuine Gold Leaf, sourced from Manetti in Florence, and Lapis Lazuli, prepared using an ancient recipe from gem grade rocks from Afghanistan.
Referencing the gilded heavens of pre-Enlightenment painting, nineteenth-century cloud photography, early scientific illustration, and twenty-first-century data, this work draws on an eclectic range of representations to explore the sky’s essence, its fragility, and its role as a barometer for a changing planet.