Salt Lines: Exploring Climate, Environment, and the Saline Influx
October 19, 2024 - March 1, 2025
Salt lines mark the merging of saltwater and freshwater, where river meets sea. Migrations, manipulations, and transmutations of saltwater and saline bodies, however, have transformed salt into both the maker and marker of climate change. Salt lines now form the boundary between present crisis and future disaster—a line that we as humans are dangerously close to crossing. In Salt Lines: Exploring Climate, Environment, and the Saline Influx, the past, present, and future of salt in our local landscape and global community are examined across three bodies of work that employ multiple media.
Two immersive installations by Hylozoic/Desires, a multimedia performance duo featuring Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser, form the heart of the exhibition, tracing salt lines across time and space, and into an imagined future. Namak Nazar, an aural sculpture that takes the form of a “pillar of salt,” employs science, myth, and history to express both the doom of climate change and the redemption of inward reflection.
Photographic works by noted aerial photographer David Maisel and Utah-based artist Alexandra Fuller casting Great Salt Lake as their subject provide a backdrop for Hylozoic/Desires’ installations and anchor them within a local crisis. These photographs locate the exhibition within the larger conversation surrounding Utah’s saltwater body, where extreme changes endanger its delicate ecosystems and imperil nearby human habitation.
Through the different artistic perspectives and access points presented, Salt Lines can inspire solidarity across geographic distance, connecting the plight of humans—particularly those inhabiting similar desert environs and working within agricultural economies—as they face a future defined by climate events.
David Maisel: Proving Ground
“A complex examination from the artist about the choices we have made about how to use our Western lands and the implications of those decisions…. The experience is one of immersion and disorientation, a series of otherworldly landscapes.”
—Rebecca Senf, Chief Curator, Center for Creative Photography
Co-published with Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art/Utah State University
Photography by David Maisel
Texts by William L. Fox, Tyler Green, Katie Lee-Koven, and Geoff Manaugh
Proving Ground comprises aerial and on-site photographs made at Dugway Proving Ground, a vast military compound in Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert. A primary mission of Dugway is to develop, test, and implement chemical and biological weaponry and defense programs.
The Pentagon granted Maisel access to Dugway to photograph the terrain, testing facilities, and zones of toxic weapons deployment. Proving Ground is a critical response to the formal and political aspects of Dugway, in Maisel’s words, a “hidden, walled-off, and secret site that offers the opportunity to reflect on who and what we are collectively, as a society.”