Opening with a French nuclear weapons test that irradiates a Polynesian iguana nest and thus unleashes the movie\u2019s namesake upon New York City decades later, the film is a supersized cautionary tale that largely overlooks the post-Second World War anxieties of previous Godzilla films. Instead, the terrible freak show is deployed to exploit audience appetites for metropolitan disaster, espionage, cover-ups, and the power plays of two fencing heavyweights. The closing shot, in which Godzilla\u2019s sole progeny emerges from a destroyed Madison Square Garden, left eight-year-old me fraught with radiation worries, and it took decades to find a way to escape the sense of impending doom and the infinite, horrifying possibilities of what would one day come for me and everyone I love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Canada is the second-largest producer and fourth-largest exporter of uranium on the planet. The nation currently has nineteen reactors and plans to build more in order to meet needed carbon reduction targets and grow a billion-dollar industry. Canada and the rest of the West are caught between the goal of reaching net-zero emissions and the increased vulnerability of a reactor failing because of an engineering flaw or getting targeted by a warring country\u200a\u2014\u200aa risk heightened by the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

\"Alex-Wellerstein-NUKEMAP-Tsar-bomb\" — Alex Wellerstein<\/strong>
NUKEMAP, Tsar Bomba, <\/em>screen capture, 2023.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Although the scope of nuclear technology has changed\u200a\u2014\u200adue to the acknowledgement of uranium\u2019s function as a \u201cclean\u201d source of energy\u200a\u2014\u200athe anxiety remains the same and has wrought psychological responses that succeed those of the previous generation: worrying about food shortages, crouching under desks, and other doomsday tics. Contemporary fears of nuclear devastation are evidenced through trending search terms such as \u201cworld war 3,\u201d \u201cChernobyl power plant,\u201d and others that start with the adjective \u201cnuclear.\u201d I\u2019m reminded of Craiyon (formerly DALL\u00b7E mini), an open-source, deep-learning AI \u00e0 la ChatGPT that constructs a set of stills inspired by users\u2019 text prompts, revealing perverse and bizarre images. Among the most lovable creations is the one obtained with the phrase \u201clofi nuclear war to relax and study to,\u201d a distortion of the ambient-and-chill YouTube loop featuring an every-student that now depicts a smeared figure looking upon an atomic explosion. Another site where people can project their fears is the historian of science Alex Wellerstein\u2019s NUKEMAP (2012\u200a\u2013<\/em>\u200aongoing),^{1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 1 <\/a> - Alex Wellerstein, NUKEMAP, accessible online.<\/span> a website that gives users the tools to scale the casualties and violence of history\u2019s most famous nukes, measuring how far away from their postal code the Tsar Bomba (the largest bomb tested by the USSR) or Fat Man (the bomb that fell on Nagasaki) would have had to land for them to survive. These and other technological hypotheticals ultimately do little to help stave off fears, and they leave us without a way to move forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n

**Contemporary responses to nuclear anxiety through art often transmute and contextualize our fear by leaning further into it.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n**
**<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n**Take the International Uranium Film Festival, the planet\u2019s annual cinematic lamentation of all things radioactive, which, despite the barrage of grinning participants featured on its website, was nonetheless founded in 2010 on a grim need to raise awareness and stop the post-Chernobyl amnesia that hypermodern daily life thrust upon us all, on the premise that \u201cEveryone should know about nuclear dangers.\u201d ^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - International Uranium Film Festival, \u201cAbout Us: Telling the Secrets of the Nuclear Story,\u201d accessible online.<\/span> Down under, Kerri Meehan and Alexander Ressel produced *Ungurrookoolpum<\/em> (2018),*^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - Arts Council England, \u201cUngurrookoolpum,\u201d accessible online.<\/span> an interactive documentary-cum-cautionary tale set at a radium-soaked lake in Australia\u2019s Northern Territory, near the Rum Jungle uranium mine that operated for almost twenty years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"Alex-Rusell-Kerri-Meehan-Ungurookoolpum-Rum-Jungle-South-Lake-Reserve-Sign\"$
Kerri Meehan & Alexander Ressel<\/strong>
Rum Jungle South Lake Reserve Sign<\/em>,
archive from the project Ungurrookoolpum<\/em>, 2017.
Photo: courtesy of the artists & National Archives of Australia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Confirming in so many ways how nuclear colonialism makes safe coexistence with uranium impossible, Meehan and Ressel juxtaposed familial leisure and extracted pigments from tailings ponds, playing around with the mushroom cloud that perpetually hangs over the town of Batchelor and reinscribing the shadow presence of past catastrophes in a historical timeline. Even powerfully autobiographical renderings, such as Liz Faust\u2019s curated exhibit, Elongated Shadows<\/em> (2020), a ghastly, parasitic assemblage of intergenerational attachments to nuclear warfare, platforming the work of hibakusha(intergenerational survivors of atomic bombs and other radioactive violence) and the wives of those who worked on the Manhattan Project alike, offer little comfort. Faust (and many of her contemporaries) do well to foment a \u201cmeasured response to current nuclear tensions.\u201d^{4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 4 <\/a> - \u201cElongated Shadows<\/em> curated by Liz Faust,\u201d Apexart, accessible online.<\/span> But although attendees receive a complex portrait of what might come, the question of how to move forward on a personal level remains. With each contemporary rendering, the scale of the disaster does not decrease but increases exponentially, and each successive installation, exhibition, and detection of radiation by the Geiger counter stimulates our fear but fails to stave it off, let alone equip us with a codex of resiliency. One could argue that the act of witnessing and raising awareness merely sandwiches us between the dangers that came and those to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"Migiwa-Orimo-Fiun-Elongated-Shadow\"$
Migiwa Orimo<\/strong>
Fuin (sealed)<\/em>, 2019, installation view from the exhibition Elongated Shadow<\/em>, Apexart, New York, 2020.
Photo: Kei Ito<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"Kei-Ito-Elongated-Shadow\"$
Kei Ito<\/strong>
Sungazing<\/em>, 2015, installation view from the exhibition Elongated Shadow<\/em>, Apexart, New York, 2020.
Photo: Kei Ito<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Anishinaabe understandings of the universe cede little to the Anthropocene and hold reverence to the forces below and around and within the natural world. Such infinitely scalable fears that history affords us hold little sway when humanity takes its place along an ongoing, lifelong movement. Anishinaabe understandings of the universe often define people\u200a\u2014\u200aall of us, the bombers and the bombed\u200a\u2014\u200aas belonging to a continuum, forever privy to the flux that sucks us into relief, a realm where solids are not actually all that impermeable but are beholden to space and motion and utterly bound to the inevitability of change and transformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"Bonnie-Devine-Phenomenology\"$
Bonnie Devine<\/strong>
Phenomenology<\/em>, installation view, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Vaughan, 2015.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
I recently came upon the work of Bonnie Devine, an installation artist from Serpent River First Nation whose in-situ practice achieves a relationship with her home world, a vast cache of territory and peoples that was upended by the discovery of uranium in Canada. In Devine\u2019s words, her interventions centre Anishinaabe ways of knowing and \u201cwhat the rock had to say about that.\u201d^{5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 5 <\/a> - Art Museum University of Toronto, \u201cStone as Species: Artist Talks by Bonnie Devine + Egill S\u00e6bj\u00f6rnsson,\u201d Vimeo<\/em>, 19 February 2016, 91 min 24 s, accessible online.<\/span> In Rocks, Stones, and Dust <\/em>(2015), an exhibition at the University of Toronto Art Centre, Devine\u2019s Phenomenology<\/em> (2015) found attendees considering ninety-two blanketed stakes that led to a piece of gneiss and a uranium sample on a shelf. Extracted from a long gone sulphuric acid plant, the metamorphic resonance of the gneiss contrasts nicely with the decaying uranium. These two chunks, perhaps to Devine and the many who have studied her work, usher in a reverence for the seemingly undetectable aspects of being part of the earth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
A contemporary of Devine\u2019s, Robert Houle, engages with matter\u2019s understandings of consciousness and reality. In Zero Hour <\/em>(1988), recently on loan from Agnes Etherington Art Centre to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Contemporary Calgary, and the Winnipeg Art Gallery for a retrospective titled Red is Beautiful<\/em>, Houle decentres fears of radioactive decay by centring what the land understands. Made in response to the forty-fourth anniversary of Trinity, the code name given to the world\u2019s first nuclear explosion, in New Mexico, Zero Hour <\/em>includes a non-sequential quadriptych of the explosion installed on the wall opposite the gallery entrance. A circle of stones in the centre of the room mediates attendees\u2019 proximity to the four black-and-white paintings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The word for stone in Anishinaabemowin is asin<\/em>. An animate noun, asin carries with it a multidimensional understanding of time and a way to live beyond these uncertain times, whereby stones are recognized and spoken of as grandfathers, slowpokes, people, and relatives of humans that have existed longer than we have or will. Anishinaabemowin teacher James Vukelich Kaagegaabaw said in his lesson on asin that it \u201cradically transformed the way [he] looked at the world.\u201d^{6<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 6 <\/a> - James Vukelich Kaagegaabaw, Instagram post, instagram.com\/p\/CdwFJ_DoBgN\/.<\/span> Perhaps such a shift in consciousness has to do with the longstanding timescale that every stone embodies, how this transformation reflects the changing earth, or our ability to recognize the value all stones have after we stop overlooking them. In Zero Hour<\/em>, a delineated trinity of sand circles sit inside the circle of stones, within which are, respectively, a blue plus sign, a red crown that perhaps signifies the monarchy, and three yellow tetrahedrons that remind me of a radioactivity hazard motif. In the centre of the three circles lies a rectangular slab that bears the sand art\u2019s colours, and inside the circles are arrows pointing in four directions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
*$\"Robert-Houle-Zero-Hour\"$* Robert Houle<\/strong>
Zero Hour<\/em>, 1988.
Photo: courtesy of Agnes Etherington Art Centre,
Queen’s University, Kingston<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Situated opposite of the installation\u2019s bomb paintings is a blacked-out wall bearing an ominous excerpt based on a quotation by Treaty 6 commissioner Alexander Morris: \u201cFor as long as the sun shines, the rivers flow, the grass grows.\u201d One might see Morris\u2019s 1876 declaration, with its pristine and clean announcement, as illuminating the failures of the state and imploring its benefactors to maintain the promises, and to reflect a zero hour, a common meaning of which refers to \u201cthe hour at which a planned military operation is scheduled to start.\u201d ^{7<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 7 <\/a> - \u201cZero hour,\u201d Merriam-Wesbster.com Dictionary<\/em>, Merriam-Webster, accessible online.<\/span> In this room, Houle contrasts the existential terror that those who come from the land have repeatedly had to surmount when grappling with the legacy of nuclear anxiety that Trinity ushered into Western consciousness. I like to think that while acknowledging how much of the world has already undergone mass destruction, he also shows how harbouring such anxiety is a sign of good fortune.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
*Zero Hour<\/em>, which also refers to a time when a \u201cvital decision or decisive change must be* ^{8<\/sup><\/a><\/span>made,\u201d(\/NOTE]} 8 <\/a> - \u201cZero hour,\u201d Merriam-Wesbster.com Dictionary<\/em>.<\/span> reminds us that the language we use shapes our worldview, and that the loss or revitalization of it will alter our reality more than any radioactive lizard or mushroom cloud ever could. Consider also that uranium is a mineral that comes from asin. Yet, within Houle\u2019s nuclear site, asin as fractured rocks and atomized sand merits celebration and reverence. Houle\u2019s interwoven circles, solid and uncompromised, suggest that relief from the projected grief of nuclear fallout might exist beneath our feet. And now, whenever I think of asin, I\u2019m struck by the same amazement that I feel toward the aeon beyond earth, the planet\u2019s smallness among the stars, and the clarity of that awe balms the grief that nuclear power once engendered within me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A writer of Anishinaabe and Portuguese descent and an off-reserve member of Pinaymootang First Nation, Cody Caetano is the author of *Half-Bads in White Regalia: A Memoir <\/em>(Hamish Hamilton Canada, 2022).<\/p>\n*
Alex Wellerstein, Alexander Ressel, Bonnie Devine, Cody Caetano, Kei Ito, Kerri Meehan, Migiwa Orimo, Robert Houle<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nuclear anxiety first oozed through me after my sister and I moved into the derelict basement apartment that our parents sometimes rented out for extra cash. At the height of our stay, we ate Frosted Flakes and watched Roland Emmerich\u2019s 1998 Godzilla,<\/em> Hollywood\u2019s first take, bloated and chauvinistic, on\u00a0TOHO Studio\u2019s kaiju franchise.<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":186113,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[6052],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[6124],"artistes":[6125,6126,6127,6128,6129,6130,2652],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[],"class_list":["post-186168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-108-resilience-en","auteurs-cody-caetano-en","artistes-alex-wellerstein-en","artistes-alexander-ressel-en","artistes-bonnie-devine-en","artistes-kei-ito-en","artistes-kerri-meehan-en","artistes-migiwa-orimo-en","artistes-robert-houle-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186168"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186168\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":271148,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186168\/revisions\/271148"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186168"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=186168"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=186168"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=186168"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=186168"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=186168"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=186168"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=186168"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=186168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}

Alex Wellerstein<\/strong>
NUKEMAP, Tsar Bomba, <\/em>screen capture, 2023.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Although the scope of nuclear technology has changed\u200a\u2014\u200adue to the acknowledgement of uranium\u2019s function as a \u201cclean\u201d source of energy\u200a\u2014\u200athe anxiety remains the same and has wrought psychological responses that succeed those of the previous generation: worrying about food shortages, crouching under desks, and other doomsday tics. Contemporary fears of nuclear devastation are evidenced through trending search terms such as \u201cworld war 3,\u201d \u201cChernobyl power plant,\u201d and others that start with the adjective \u201cnuclear.\u201d I\u2019m reminded of Craiyon (formerly DALL\u00b7E mini), an open-source, deep-learning AI \u00e0 la ChatGPT that constructs a set of stills inspired by users\u2019 text prompts, revealing perverse and bizarre images. Among the most lovable creations is the one obtained with the phrase \u201clofi nuclear war to relax and study to,\u201d a distortion of the ambient-and-chill YouTube loop featuring an every-student that now depicts a smeared figure looking upon an atomic explosion. Another site where people can project their fears is the historian of science Alex Wellerstein\u2019s NUKEMAP (2012\u200a\u2013<\/em>\u200aongoing),^{1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 1 <\/a> - Alex Wellerstein, NUKEMAP, accessible online.<\/span> a website that gives users the tools to scale the casualties and violence of history\u2019s most famous nukes, measuring how far away from their postal code the Tsar Bomba (the largest bomb tested by the USSR) or Fat Man (the bomb that fell on Nagasaki) would have had to land for them to survive. These and other technological hypotheticals ultimately do little to help stave off fears, and they leave us without a way to move forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n

**Contemporary responses to nuclear anxiety through art often transmute and contextualize our fear by leaning further into it.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n**
**<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n**Take the International Uranium Film Festival, the planet\u2019s annual cinematic lamentation of all things radioactive, which, despite the barrage of grinning participants featured on its website, was nonetheless founded in 2010 on a grim need to raise awareness and stop the post-Chernobyl amnesia that hypermodern daily life thrust upon us all, on the premise that \u201cEveryone should know about nuclear dangers.\u201d ^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - International Uranium Film Festival, \u201cAbout Us: Telling the Secrets of the Nuclear Story,\u201d accessible online.<\/span> Down under, Kerri Meehan and Alexander Ressel produced *Ungurrookoolpum<\/em> (2018),*^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - Arts Council England, \u201cUngurrookoolpum,\u201d accessible online.<\/span> an interactive documentary-cum-cautionary tale set at a radium-soaked lake in Australia\u2019s Northern Territory, near the Rum Jungle uranium mine that operated for almost twenty years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"Alex-Rusell-Kerri-Meehan-Ungurookoolpum-Rum-Jungle-South-Lake-Reserve-Sign\"$
Kerri Meehan & Alexander Ressel<\/strong>
Rum Jungle South Lake Reserve Sign<\/em>,
archive from the project Ungurrookoolpum<\/em>, 2017.
Photo: courtesy of the artists & National Archives of Australia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Confirming in so many ways how nuclear colonialism makes safe coexistence with uranium impossible, Meehan and Ressel juxtaposed familial leisure and extracted pigments from tailings ponds, playing around with the mushroom cloud that perpetually hangs over the town of Batchelor and reinscribing the shadow presence of past catastrophes in a historical timeline. Even powerfully autobiographical renderings, such as Liz Faust\u2019s curated exhibit, Elongated Shadows<\/em> (2020), a ghastly, parasitic assemblage of intergenerational attachments to nuclear warfare, platforming the work of hibakusha(intergenerational survivors of atomic bombs and other radioactive violence) and the wives of those who worked on the Manhattan Project alike, offer little comfort. Faust (and many of her contemporaries) do well to foment a \u201cmeasured response to current nuclear tensions.\u201d^{4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 4 <\/a> - \u201cElongated Shadows<\/em> curated by Liz Faust,\u201d Apexart, accessible online.<\/span> But although attendees receive a complex portrait of what might come, the question of how to move forward on a personal level remains. With each contemporary rendering, the scale of the disaster does not decrease but increases exponentially, and each successive installation, exhibition, and detection of radiation by the Geiger counter stimulates our fear but fails to stave it off, let alone equip us with a codex of resiliency. One could argue that the act of witnessing and raising awareness merely sandwiches us between the dangers that came and those to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"Migiwa-Orimo-Fiun-Elongated-Shadow\"$
Migiwa Orimo<\/strong>
Fuin (sealed)<\/em>, 2019, installation view from the exhibition Elongated Shadow<\/em>, Apexart, New York, 2020.
Photo: Kei Ito<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"Kei-Ito-Elongated-Shadow\"$
Kei Ito<\/strong>
Sungazing<\/em>, 2015, installation view from the exhibition Elongated Shadow<\/em>, Apexart, New York, 2020.
Photo: Kei Ito<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Anishinaabe understandings of the universe cede little to the Anthropocene and hold reverence to the forces below and around and within the natural world. Such infinitely scalable fears that history affords us hold little sway when humanity takes its place along an ongoing, lifelong movement. Anishinaabe understandings of the universe often define people\u200a\u2014\u200aall of us, the bombers and the bombed\u200a\u2014\u200aas belonging to a continuum, forever privy to the flux that sucks us into relief, a realm where solids are not actually all that impermeable but are beholden to space and motion and utterly bound to the inevitability of change and transformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"Bonnie-Devine-Phenomenology\"$
Bonnie Devine<\/strong>
Phenomenology<\/em>, installation view, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Vaughan, 2015.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
I recently came upon the work of Bonnie Devine, an installation artist from Serpent River First Nation whose in-situ practice achieves a relationship with her home world, a vast cache of territory and peoples that was upended by the discovery of uranium in Canada. In Devine\u2019s words, her interventions centre Anishinaabe ways of knowing and \u201cwhat the rock had to say about that.\u201d^{5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 5 <\/a> - Art Museum University of Toronto, \u201cStone as Species: Artist Talks by Bonnie Devine + Egill S\u00e6bj\u00f6rnsson,\u201d Vimeo<\/em>, 19 February 2016, 91 min 24 s, accessible online.<\/span> In Rocks, Stones, and Dust <\/em>(2015), an exhibition at the University of Toronto Art Centre, Devine\u2019s Phenomenology<\/em> (2015) found attendees considering ninety-two blanketed stakes that led to a piece of gneiss and a uranium sample on a shelf. Extracted from a long gone sulphuric acid plant, the metamorphic resonance of the gneiss contrasts nicely with the decaying uranium. These two chunks, perhaps to Devine and the many who have studied her work, usher in a reverence for the seemingly undetectable aspects of being part of the earth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
A contemporary of Devine\u2019s, Robert Houle, engages with matter\u2019s understandings of consciousness and reality. In Zero Hour <\/em>(1988), recently on loan from Agnes Etherington Art Centre to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Contemporary Calgary, and the Winnipeg Art Gallery for a retrospective titled Red is Beautiful<\/em>, Houle decentres fears of radioactive decay by centring what the land understands. Made in response to the forty-fourth anniversary of Trinity, the code name given to the world\u2019s first nuclear explosion, in New Mexico, Zero Hour <\/em>includes a non-sequential quadriptych of the explosion installed on the wall opposite the gallery entrance. A circle of stones in the centre of the room mediates attendees\u2019 proximity to the four black-and-white paintings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The word for stone in Anishinaabemowin is asin<\/em>. An animate noun, asin carries with it a multidimensional understanding of time and a way to live beyond these uncertain times, whereby stones are recognized and spoken of as grandfathers, slowpokes, people, and relatives of humans that have existed longer than we have or will. Anishinaabemowin teacher James Vukelich Kaagegaabaw said in his lesson on asin that it \u201cradically transformed the way [he] looked at the world.\u201d^{6<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 6 <\/a> - James Vukelich Kaagegaabaw, Instagram post, instagram.com\/p\/CdwFJ_DoBgN\/.<\/span> Perhaps such a shift in consciousness has to do with the longstanding timescale that every stone embodies, how this transformation reflects the changing earth, or our ability to recognize the value all stones have after we stop overlooking them. In Zero Hour<\/em>, a delineated trinity of sand circles sit inside the circle of stones, within which are, respectively, a blue plus sign, a red crown that perhaps signifies the monarchy, and three yellow tetrahedrons that remind me of a radioactivity hazard motif. In the centre of the three circles lies a rectangular slab that bears the sand art\u2019s colours, and inside the circles are arrows pointing in four directions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
*$\"Robert-Houle-Zero-Hour\"$* Robert Houle<\/strong>
Zero Hour<\/em>, 1988.
Photo: courtesy of Agnes Etherington Art Centre,
Queen’s University, Kingston<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Situated opposite of the installation\u2019s bomb paintings is a blacked-out wall bearing an ominous excerpt based on a quotation by Treaty 6 commissioner Alexander Morris: \u201cFor as long as the sun shines, the rivers flow, the grass grows.\u201d One might see Morris\u2019s 1876 declaration, with its pristine and clean announcement, as illuminating the failures of the state and imploring its benefactors to maintain the promises, and to reflect a zero hour, a common meaning of which refers to \u201cthe hour at which a planned military operation is scheduled to start.\u201d ^{7<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 7 <\/a> - \u201cZero hour,\u201d Merriam-Wesbster.com Dictionary<\/em>, Merriam-Webster, accessible online.<\/span> In this room, Houle contrasts the existential terror that those who come from the land have repeatedly had to surmount when grappling with the legacy of nuclear anxiety that Trinity ushered into Western consciousness. I like to think that while acknowledging how much of the world has already undergone mass destruction, he also shows how harbouring such anxiety is a sign of good fortune.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
*Zero Hour<\/em>, which also refers to a time when a \u201cvital decision or decisive change must be* ^{8<\/sup><\/a><\/span>made,\u201d(\/NOTE]} 8 <\/a> - \u201cZero hour,\u201d Merriam-Wesbster.com Dictionary<\/em>.<\/span> reminds us that the language we use shapes our worldview, and that the loss or revitalization of it will alter our reality more than any radioactive lizard or mushroom cloud ever could. Consider also that uranium is a mineral that comes from asin. Yet, within Houle\u2019s nuclear site, asin as fractured rocks and atomized sand merits celebration and reverence. Houle\u2019s interwoven circles, solid and uncompromised, suggest that relief from the projected grief of nuclear fallout might exist beneath our feet. And now, whenever I think of asin, I\u2019m struck by the same amazement that I feel toward the aeon beyond earth, the planet\u2019s smallness among the stars, and the clarity of that awe balms the grief that nuclear power once engendered within me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A writer of Anishinaabe and Portuguese descent and an off-reserve member of Pinaymootang First Nation, Cody Caetano is the author of *Half-Bads in White Regalia: A Memoir <\/em>(Hamish Hamilton Canada, 2022).<\/p>\n*
Alex Wellerstein, Alexander Ressel, Bonnie Devine, Cody Caetano, Kei Ito, Kerri Meehan, Migiwa Orimo, Robert Houle<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nuclear anxiety first oozed through me after my sister and I moved into the derelict basement apartment that our parents sometimes rented out for extra cash. At the height of our stay, we ate Frosted Flakes and watched Roland Emmerich\u2019s 1998 Godzilla,<\/em> Hollywood\u2019s first take, bloated and chauvinistic, on\u00a0TOHO Studio\u2019s kaiju franchise.<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":186113,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[6052],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[6124],"artistes":[6125,6126,6127,6128,6129,6130,2652],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[],"class_list":["post-186168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-108-resilience-en","auteurs-cody-caetano-en","artistes-alex-wellerstein-en","artistes-alexander-ressel-en","artistes-bonnie-devine-en","artistes-kei-ito-en","artistes-kerri-meehan-en","artistes-migiwa-orimo-en","artistes-robert-houle-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186168"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186168\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":271148,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186168\/revisions\/271148"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186168"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=186168"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=186168"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=186168"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=186168"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=186168"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=186168"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=186168"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=186168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}