Located in Wendover, Utah, Wendover Airfield was a training base for the Army Air Corps with a major role in the Manhattan Project, the top-secret effort to develop the world’s first atomic bomb. Through a precise combination of objects, sculpture, moving images and photographs, she produces an archival narrative that encompasses not only the desert site of the first atomic explosion but the post-war suburbs that expanded rapidly in its shadows, not only the laboratories that buzzed with scientific discovery but the homes where the cost of war was actualized in the slow decay of cancerous bodies. The hangar housed the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb Little Boy on the city of Hiroshima. Kavanagh’s approach is unique in the visual records of the post-atomic era. This story is the setting for Mary Kavanagh’s exhibition, Daughters of Uranium, in which the nuclear era is rendered as a totalizing concept rather than as a specific event or period.
#Wendover enola gay hangar install#
“On July 16, 1945, the United States detonated the world’s first atomic bomb, releasing atmospheric radiation and so marking the beginning of a new planetary story. This Maphoto shows Brad Rasmussen, of Culp Construction, preparing to install insulation over a doorway at the historic 'Enola Gay' hangar at the Wendover Airport in Wendover, Utah. She is an advisory member of the Atomic Photographers Guild, and an Associate Member of the Centre for Documentary Studies, School of Image Arts, Ryerson University, Toronto.Įmail: Daughters of Uranium With projects in Canada, Japan, Italy, and the United States (New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Alaska), Kavanagh’s work is of particular relevance to current scholarship in nuclear culture, commemorative and Anthropocene studies. Artist residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and the Canadian Forces Artists Program, have resulted in long-term projects that operate the intersection of artistic and scholarly practice. Her work has been supported by grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Her work is exhibited internationally, and she has contributed to numerous publications including Through Post-Atomic Eyes (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2020), and Prefix Photo 32: Occupying Forces (Toronto, 2015). Mary Kavanagh is a Professor and Board of Governors Research Chair in the Department of Art, University of Lethbridge, where she teaches drawing and interdisciplinary studio.