Salt Lake City–based artist Joshua Graham explores site-specificity through walking and collecting, gathering objects in the foothills above the city and reconfiguring them in the gallery.
Salt Lake City, Utah | art.utah.edu/faculty-list/joshua-graham
Salt Lake City sits upon the eastern shoreline of the Great Salt Lake, while the Wasatch Range and the Oquirrh Mountains surround it in every other direction. When viewed with an eastward gaze, these natural confines create the effect of an urban skyline cradled within the monumental embrace of geologic formations. It is the visual hallmark of the largest city in Utah.
SLC-based artist Joshua Graham’s installation Walking in Place (2021) explores—conceptually and physically—the foothills that immediately separate Salt Lake’s urban sprawl from the mountain ranges proper. While in residence at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Graham maintained a regular practice of walking the paths that wind throughout those foothills. During these ambles, the artist would collect found objects, artifacts, and ephemera he encountered along the way.
Graham then reconfigured and arranged these objects into fifteen sculptures situated on a grid of museum plinths. The lighting for the installation consisted of three studio lamps set at twenty-three degrees, emanating from the southwest corner of the space. This positioning mimicked the angle and direction of the sun during the winter solstice, thus producing shadow play similar to what the artist experienced on his walks. Finally, an audio track of field recordings Graham collected in the foothills enveloped Walking in Place in a low-frequency sonic wash.
One of the more curious aspects of Walking in Place is how Graham identifies the project—as a site-specific installation. The objects in his artwork—whether tactile, acoustic, or light-based—are all displaced from or approximating the site of origin. This tends to indicate something that is anything but site-specific.
Yet the main thrust of Graham’s installation is to challenge the very notion of site-specificity itself. He argues for a “de-centered perspective” that fosters “alternative ways of engaging with the local environment.” The concept of site-specificity can be reimagined as a “portrait of a place” using artifacts from it so as to create a “landscape of an artist” from that space. To this extent, the site is both the foothills surrounding SLC (via displaced artifacts) and Graham himself. In doing so, the artist not only recalibrates the idea of site-specificity, but highlights the inextricable entanglements between humans and nature, as well as people and places.
