Candace R. Nunag
Hanna Rose Shell

Thursday, August 14th, 2025
7:00PM—9:00PM

Candace R. Nunag will read from her most recent book, A Solar Flare, a hybrid of short works exploring the 1859 Carrington solar flare:

A flood of illumination, a cosmic cataclysm frozen in time—the Carrington Event of 1859 was the most disruptive solar flare in recorded history, an electromagnetic storm that wiped out telegraph systems across the world and which, if it were to occur today, might well destroy anything on the planet with an electrical circuit. A Solar Flare is a hybrid of short essays, research notes, poems, graphite rubbings, and instant photographs, as well as bits of flash fiction, all simultaneously contemplating technology and memory, while preoccupied with the 1859 solar flare. The ghost of the Carrington Event haunts A Solar Flare with the promise of definitive answers about the narrator’s many severed connections: her digital, supernatural, eastern, western, and analog past. It is an attempt to illuminate the path of thought, wending its way through the tangles of rumination and irreconcilable spaces of wonder.

Candace R. Nunag holds an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder. She is a literary prose writer whose work is centered on biracial subjectivity and identity; specifically, her work engages with multicultural practices of grief and mourning while also exploring topics like technology, addiction, suicide, and survivorship.

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Hanna Rose Shell will screen a new film from her residency at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, highlighting the legacy of the Climax Observatory.

Hanna Rose Shell is Professor of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts, and of Art & Art History, at the University of Colorado Boulder whose research and creative work encompass scholarly writing, photography, installation and film. Her current project, titled Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds,and centers on solar astronomy and the impact of a remote astronomical observatory built atop a mine at Climax, in Colorado's Rocky Mountains, in the 1940s. Shell’s book, Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance, published by Zone Books in 2012 (translated into French by Zones Sensibles) in 2014, theorizes camouflage as an adaptive logic of escape from photographic representation. New collaged forms of media practice—in arenas from science to art, fashion to weaponry—take shape in counterpoint to, and exploiting, technological advances in surveillance. Her book, Shoddy: From Devil's Dust to the Renaissance of Rags (University of Chicago Press, 2020) examines the history of textile recycling; in her analysis, “shoddy,” referring to re-processed wool and “the afterlife of rags,” the earliest form of industrial recycling, as a lens for thinking about sustainability, self-fashioning, and the creative shaping of material culture. Shell taught in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 2009 and 2018, and served Director of the Stan Brakhage Center for Media Arts from 2020-2024. She is currently an artist/scholar in residence at the National Solar Observatory in Boulder, Colorado.