Studio Visit: Jaclyn Wright

Jaclyn Wright’s new work explores the contentious space of the Utah desert and how the ideology of “rugged individualism” has visually manifested itself.

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Photographer Jaclyn Wright’s studio doubles as her office in the art building on the campus of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. On her desk lie stacks of objects—metal plates, plywood boards, a piece of driftwood, a plastic tote lid—each gathered from the Utah desert, each one riddled with bullet holes. In Target Praxis, a two-channel video from 2021, a stationary camera captures Wright collecting litter from around a rocky desert landscape and piling it into a massive heap. She then holds up each object, echoing Martha Rosler in a kind of semiotics of the wasteland: a vacuum cleaner, a fifty-gallon drum, a laundry basket, a football helmet, a plastic bucket, sheet metal, boxes, tires, cans—each thing completely annihilated by gunfire.

I’ve known Jaclyn since she was in graduate school at Indiana University in Bloomington, from which she graduated in 2013. She grew up near Peoria, Illinois and lived in Chicago, where she taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and DePaul University. She joined the faculty of U of U in 2018, where she is an assistant professor of photography and digital imaging.

“Having grown up in the Midwest, I think when I got here, I was just like, what is this weird place?” she says about moving to Utah and experiencing the West in an intimate way for the first time, along with the extreme effects of climate change, which are especially tangible here. But Utah contained something even more surreal.

“Being in the desert, with this outsider perspective of this beautiful, magical, pristine, and extreme place and then happening upon this site where people are just shooting guns—I was just like, why are they doing this? But it’s just the most Utah thing ever,” Wright says. “People do this all the time.”

Wright is currently preparing for a solo exhibition in March 2022 at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City. The show will incorporate an installation with found objects arranged on a large-scale desert landscape photograph on vinyl that sweeps the floor, along with archival images, collages made in-camera with 4 x 5 film and cut and damaged dark slides, and video works of performances in the studio and on location in the desert. In this body of work, Wright shifts between the studio simulation of the desert and the actual desert, collapsing the two spaces while critically exploring the culture of land use and legacies of settler colonialism in the deserts around the Great Salt Lake.

“These particular locations that I’m visiting have all these intersections of complicated presents and histories,” she says. “There’s the history of settler colonialism on what is mostly Goshute ancestral lands, whose people were pushed off of it, and now this land [around the Great Salt Lake] is being crazy exploited.” She mentions the new state prison being constructed near the Salt Lake¹, the toxic magnesium operations in the area², the imposing thousand-foot-tall smelter visible from the interstate³, the military operations and testing range⁴, and the notorious biological and chemical weapons testing site known as the Dugway Proving Ground⁵.

“The Great Salt Lake is drying up, and we have no water, and it just goes on and on,” she says. Those who go out to shoot guns, with disregard to fire conditions, not to mention the extreme amounts of refuse they leave behind, exemplify an attitude of entitlement and exploitation of the land that stretches back to the ideology of Manifest Destiny, Wright contends.

Wright is interested in the work as a “visualization of violence” and in “how this ‘rugged individualist’ ideology has visually manifested itself.” A repeated motif is the high-visibility color called “blaze orange.”