Opera Obscura
Date:
Wed, Aug 5th, 2026 to Wed, Oct 7th, 2026Time:
10:00 am to 5:00 pm
Description:
Opera Obscura is a large-scale installation by Canadian artist Mary Kavanagh.
For three decades, Kavanagh has investigated sites shaped by nuclear colonialism, militarization, and industrial extraction, tracing how histories are materially inscribed in land, atmosphere, and built environments. In this new work, she turns her attention to one of the defining institutions of civic life: the library.
At the exhibition’s centre are approximately 2,000 deaccessioned books sourced from the annual collection review of the University of Lethbridge Library. Spanning disciplines, languages, and eras, each volume has been individually hand-inked and arranged in a dense gridded field. Serial and austere, the installation evokes both catalogue and cenotaph. Gilded titles, embossed surfaces, library markings, and traces of use remain partially visible beneath layers of ink. A tension between erasure and preservation extends through a companion series of black-on-black photographs in which individual volumes are isolated, lit, and slowly disclosed.
The project investigates the library as both repository and site of cultural negotiation — an institution through which knowledge is ordered, preserved, overwritten, or erased. Walter Benjamin describes the “collector’s bind”: that books do not belong to us as much as we belong to them, each inhabited by the other. ² Blackening becomes a labour of witnessing, an act of examining the histories sedimented within each book; Opera Obscura gives loss a body and articulates its weight. The work confronts incremental transformations shaping public institutions — technological change, economic pressures, and shifting political priorities — that quietly alter the conditions through which knowledge circulates. As Hannah Arendt suggests, attention is itself a civic act. ³
Monumental in scale and elegiac in tone, the project registers the slow erosion of the material record, the institutions entrusted with its keeping, and the accelerating forces that threaten both.
About the Artist
Mary Kavanagh is a Professor of Art and Board of Governors Research Chair at the University of Lethbridge. Her projects are developed through fieldwork, residencies, military embeds, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States, Australia, and Europe. Kavanagh is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. www.marykavanagh.ca
Venue:
Vernon Public Art Gallery
Address:3228-31st Avenue, Vernon, V1T 2H3
Cost:
Admission by donationTicketing and/or registration:
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