Gallery Purchase

slavick's work began with A-bombed objects from the Hiroshima Peace Museum's archive, including melted bottle, bits of metal, a hair comb, along with found ginkgo leave, tee bark, and paper origami cranes. Just as the A-bomb exposed people, nature, and objects to radiation, slavick's creative process also relies on exposure. She places the aforementioned items, already exposed to radiation, on special cyanotype paper coated with potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate. The artist processes the cyanotypes in bright sunlight, and then rinses them in water. Ghostly white objects float in a sea of blue. Many people were incinerated in the explosion, yet the archived objects survived the blast. In this way, slavick's photographs speak to aftermath, and ti the importance of persistence -- of culture, memory, will, and peace.

Dr. Ann Fox’s “Disability in Literature & Art” class wrote and recorded image descriptions of some of the works in the Van Every/Smith collection. Here one student gives a description of the work through their perspective: Teagan Crye ’25.