In her latest book, “Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography,” artist and UNC art professor elin o’Hara slavick uses mixed media to represent sites around the world that the United States has bombed.
Published by Charta Books of Milan, Italy, “Bomb After Bomb” contains 66 illustrations – 62 of them in color – each rendered as a map of bombed areas. Slavick worked from military surveillance imagery, aerial photographs, battle plans, maps and mass media sources. She created the drawings and paintings using gouache, ink, watercolors, graphite and other materials – sometimes dropping color onto a page as though a bomb might be dropped on a much larger scale. Each piece is accompanied by text with historical information.
The book also includes an essay by Carol Mavor, professor of art history at the University of Manchester in England, previously at UNC; a transcribed conversation between slavick and anthropologist Catherine Lutz, Ph.D., of Brown University, previously of UNC; and comments by nuclear war opponent Dr. Helen Caldicott. It has received favorable reviews in the arts magazines Arthur and Big, Red & Shiny and locally in The Independent Weekly, with more reviews expected.
Slavick will speak about the book at 11 a.m. Nov. 10 at McIntyre’s Fine Books and Bookends in Fearrington Village and at 7 p.m. Nov. 12 at the Regulator Bookshop at 720 Ninth St. in Durham.
Howard Zinn, professor emeritus of political science at Boston University, writes in the forward: “If the drawings of elin o’Hara slavick and the words that accompany them cause us to think about war, perhaps in ways we never did before, they will have made a powerful contribution towards a peaceful world.”
For more information, visit http://www.unc.edu/~eoslavic