Salt Lines: Exploring Climate, Environment, and the Saline Influx examines the past, present, and future of salt in the global landscape through the work of duo Hylozoic/Desires, photographer David Maisel, and poet and photographer Alexandra Fuller.
Salt Lines: Exploring Climate, Environment, and the Saline Influx
October 19, 2024–March 8, 2025
Southern Utah Museum of Art, Cedar City
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 suggest borders and barriers, but they also invoke connections spanning chronologies, continents, and cultures. In the present, however, salt lines represent a menacing saline influx that forms 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 at Southern Utah Museum of Art, the past, present, and future of salt in our local landscape and across our global community are examined through the work of three artists: multimedia duo Hylozoic/Desires, noted aerial photographer David Maisel, and Utah-based poet and photographer Alexandra Fuller.
In 2003, Maisel embarked on an aerial survey of the surreal, apocalyptic, and strangely beautiful Great Salt Lake. The resulting series, Terminal Mirage, selections from which are featured in Salt Lines, examines the periphery of the Lake, including zones of mineral evaporation ponds and macabre industrial pollution. These depictions of damaged wastelands are both spectacular and horrifying. Their sly beauty, however, invites access, increases awareness, and inspires action for causes as urgent as the Great Salt Lake and others related to climate change.
While David Maisel’s Terminal Mirage series captures the Lake’s macrocosm from above, its magnitude abstracted by his heavenly perspective, Alexandra Fuller’s images from two series—Dissolution and Tautology—present this saltwater body on an intimate human scale, interacting with the beings it at once enlivens and endangers. In Dissolution, her silver-salt prints of the Great Salt Lake in moments of dusty tumult capture the edge of its current era of extreme transformation. Tautology, a photography and poetry project centered on the Lake, further explores the dual nature of truth as reflected in the dissonant conversations surrounding climate change.
Maisel’s and Fuller’s photographs provide a backdrop for Hylozoic/Desires’s two immersive installations and anchor them within a local crisis. Namak Nazar and Piscean Premonition trace salt lines across time and space and into an imagined future. Hylozoic/Desires’s aural sculpture, Namak Nazar, takes the form of a “pillar of salt” on which loudspeakers emit an imaginary conspiracy theory, rooted in science, myth, and history, about a particle of salt that expresses the doom of climate change and the redemption of inward reflection. Piscean Premonition, on the other hand, creates an archaeological site for future humans. Salt-glazed ceramic fish contained within a ruin constructed of salt bricks evoke mass extinction along salty shorelines. Fish often appear in myths and legends around the world as symbols of fortune-telling; here, they become prophets of a precarious planetary moment.
Through the different artistic perspectives and access points presented, Salt Lines inspires solidarity across geographic distances, connecting the plight of humans as they face a future defined by climate events. The exhibition is open through March 8, 2025. A catalogue is forthcoming.
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