Bombs on the brain at the Vancouver Art Gallery

Perfectly timed to coincide with Putin’s announcement of Russia’s invincible nuclear arsenal, the exhibition Bombhead opened at the Vancouver Art Gallery on 3 March (until 17 June). Curated by John O’Brian, professor emeritus of art history, visual art and theory at the University of British Columbia, and named after a 1989/2002 work by Bruce Connor, the show looks at the impact of the nuclear age on art. It includes a dark yet compelling array of ephemera from Hiroshima to Fukushima as well as paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, photographs, film and video drawn primarily from the gallery’s own collection. For example, 1960s sci-fi book covers like The day they H-bombed Los Angeles and the satiric 1983 poster Gone With the Wind showing Reagan and Thatcher (tagline: “She promised to follow him to the end of the earth. He promised to organise it!”) are shown alongside David Hockney’s mushroom shaped Picture of a Landscape (1965) and Carol Moiseiwitsch’s haunting ink on paper Priapic Alphabet (1991). Desolate images of Nevada test sites are counterbalanced by photos of the women-led peace protests at Greenham Common airbase in England and Robert Keziere
’s series of 1970s era Greenpeace activists—a movement founded in Vancouver—offering the viewer some hope as a new Cold War looms on the horizon.