UNC art professor's ‘Heterotopias’ exhibit opens at Horace Williams House

When UNC art professor Elin O’Hara Slavick isn’t taking photographs, she makes collages — a hobby she has had since childhood.

Now, she has crafted hundreds of them, and they are being exhibited for the first time at the Horace Williams House.

The exhibit, which opened Sunday, is called “Heterotopias,” — a term coined by philosopher Michel Foucault — meaning spaces that exist in both physical and mental realms. It features the collages by Slavick, who is the first current art professor to be exhibited in the Horace Williams House.

“We are happy and honored to have her showing with us,” said Tama Hochbaum, co-chairwoman of Preservation Chapel Hill’s art committee.

“It is the first show in what we hope to be a series of educational shows of professors from UNC, as we are trying to establish a connection between Preservation Chapel Hill and the art department.”

Hochbaum proposed featuring Slavick’s works in the house’s 2014 series during a committee meeting last year.

“She is a beloved teacher at UNC — she has been there for 20 years, and she exhibits all over the world,” Hochbaum said. “It’s a logical choice for us to choose her, besides her being a personal favorite of mine.”

Slavick is a professional photographer whose works have been exhibited globally. She has published two books, including one that documented places around the world that America has bombed in the past. This will be the first time she is showing her personal collection of collages.

“I have been making collages since I was a kid,” Slavick said. “I have hundreds of them, but I’ve never really shown any of them before.”

Hochbaum and Slavick went through her books of collages before the exhibition to choose more than 60 pieces for the exhibition. She said each collage has a theme of its own — portraying war, childhood, nostalgia, marriage, history — and many are political in nature.

“There’s one where I show a woman working somewhere in Africa, sowing in the field that I put over with some writing paper from Asia, and it is glued on top of a photograph that I took in the countryside of France,” Slavick said. “The regions are from all over the world, so it’s kind of a global economic statement.”

She said she chose the theme of heterotopia because it resonates with the nature of collages.

“In my understanding, it’s a term about a space that exists that contains lots of other spaces,” she said. “It’s like a hyperlink in an email where you click on it at your computer in Chapel Hill, but you’re looking at a report in Tunisia — it’s how we all experience the world now.”

Nerys Levy, also co-chairwoman of the art committee, said this exhibition is thought-provoking and allows viewers to gain insight into a great artist’s thought process.

“Her selection of collages shows how she is willing to go beyond the call of what people assemble,” Levy said. “It makes people uncomfortable because she tries to seek truth through her art — you have to constantly explore and digest it.”

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