Proving Ground: Nevada, Toronto considers the problem of how to represent the unrepresentable in relation to images in the current ‘post-nuclear’ era of instability and escalating nuclear risk. Uranium glass dishware was placed and photographed on the archaeological remains at the site of the now inactive iconic Cold War era anti-nuclear protest camp adjacent to the Mercury Nuclear test site in Nevada. Uranium was routinely mined in northern Canada and refined near Toronto providing colour for depression-era dishware, and later as enrichment for nuclear weapons development. The green glow the dishes emit is the result of light shone to detect the normally imperceptible radioactivity. The problematic materiality of the dishes is revealed through documentation: an invisible threat to the body is in contrast to the objects’ benign domesticity and calls up the now absent bodies of the former protestors as an imperative reminder to re-inhabit the spaces of protest.
Interview with Erin Siddall by Leila Timmins:
Erin Siddall is a Vancouver-based visual artist whose work interrogates the viewer into thinking about looking rather than what they are looking at, especially the corporeal experience of media. Siddall’s practice considers the problem of how to represent the unrepresentable with photography: invisible environmental hazards, hidden histories, traumatic events, including where to find the arbitrary divisions between safe and unsafe. Her current work investigates nuclear histories within a new era of escalating risk. Siddall holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia (2017), a Bachelor of Media Arts from Emily Carr University (2011), and has screened and shown in solo, public or group contexts at galleries and festivals such as Access Gallery, Satellite Gallery, CSA Space, The Helen and Morris Belkin Art Gallery, Gallery 295, The Western Front Gallery, Winsor Gallery, and the Burrard Art Foundation Studio. She is currently included in the exhibition Bombhead at Vancouver Art Gallery, and co-curator of Alternate Sights at Back Gallery Projects during Capture festival. You can find her public art installation for Burrard Art Foundation in Vancouver until August of 2018.
