VITRINE
EXHIBITION SERIES
MAR 15 – APR 15, 2024
Shanna Merola
Nuclear Winter
Nuclear Winter includes works on paper by multidisciplinary artist Shanna Merola. The exhibition features digital and analogue photo collages that combine conceptual and documentary photography. The series examines toxic legacies of environmental disasters through evocative juxtapositions of biomedical, architectural, and landscape imagery.
“…Working with imagery of climate disaster, my handmade photo-collages are informed by the stories of environmental justice struggles past and present. Travelling to EPA designated Superfund sites, I have documented firsthand the slow violence of deregulation…” — Shanna Merola
Shanna Merola is an artist, legal worker, and environmental justice organizer based in Detroit, MI. Merola has been awarded studio residencies and fellowships through MacDowell, the Studios at MASS MoCA, Banff Centre for Arts + Creativity, Kala Institute of Art, the Society for Photographic Education, Generator Arts Accelerator, the Puffin Foundation, Bulk Space, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. Her work has been exhibited nationally and abroad, most recently at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (South Korea) Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills, MI) Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (Detroit, MI), TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image (Philadelphia, PA), University of Michigan Museum of Art (Ann Arbor, MI). She holds a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Artist’s Statement About the Work
At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, an unfathomable flash of light stretched across the vast expanse of desert sky in Alamogordo, NM. The atomic sublime – born at this moment without referent – unleashed a new era of fallout, fear, and post-modern dread. Over the next few decades, drifting radioactive debris from nuclear testing carried out a silent, molecular attack on the DNA of downwind communities across the American West. Trinity, the first of countless ecologically devastating explosions, also marked the inception of a covert government program which calculated, measured, and monitored the effects of this fallout. Decades later, declassified government documents revealed that the people and animals inhabiting these sacrifice zones were known collateral damage, otherwise referred to as “a low use segment of the population”.
Set against the backdrop of Cold War inspired architecture, Nuclear Winter investigates the visual manifestation of atomic anxiety, both physically and psychologically. Since the inception of the Manhattan Project, the geographical topographies of our modern landscape have been forever altered by underground nuclear waste containment systems, decommissioned bomb shelters, hidden government laboratories, and test sites built to withstand the blast of a hundred suns. Across cities and college campuses, the un-loving grey concrete of brutalist monuments still tower overhead – eternally poised and ready for attack – while suburban fallout shelters have transformed into backyard time capsules. These anachronistic relics serve to memorialize the fears of a society on the perceived brink of impending annihilation. But the day-to-day horrors of the nuclear project wrought a more insidious violence. From atomic test site veterans to frontline communities burdened with radioactive waste, long-term effects on the human body range from rare types of cancer to miscarriage, and genetic mutation.