Installation view of The Great Salt Lake: An Uplifting Artistic Oasis on the ground floor of The Salt Lake County Government Center’s south building.

In a new grouping of works from its permanent collection, The Salt Lake County Government Center has created an exhibition entitled The Great Salt Lake: An Uplifting Artistic Oasis. How, a visitor might ask, can a body of undrinkable salt water be an oasis, let alone an “uplifting artistic” one? Throughout the exhibit—which isorganized with the support of Wake the Great Salt Lake— birds, streams, lake-effect snow, and farms are all shown to be dependent on the lake, and amply demonstrate why the lake needs to be saved. How, a critic might ask, is the best way to urge this conservation?

The strongest case for the Great Salt Lake as an oasis is perhaps as an oasis for creatures, like birds. There are about 339 species of birds that living, migrate through and breed in the place. At least three of them make an appearance here: Marjorie McClure depicts a dark bird among a flurry of feathers, possibly a reference to molting season and Elizabeth Dewitt depicts a densely packed group of dunlins, a species that migrates between its breeding grounds in the arctic and the Great Salt Lake. The most well-known species from the lake is depicted in “Gulls and Surf,” a lively painting by Rose Salisbury of seagulls by rocks and a splash of water. Compositionally, the painting sends the viewer’s eyes in a circle around the birds, some of which are looking downwards, perhaps searching for brine shrimp. The birds aren’t merely posing, but moving actively within the environment they depend on.

One of the exhibit’s strengths is that it expands the significance of the lake beyond the lake itself, towards other settings and environmental processes. Clay Wagstaff’s “Clouds” and Al Denyer’s “Flow IV” are used to express the importance of the water cycle and water flows as essential aspects of the lake’s preservation. Wagstaff’s painting is a carefully rendered image of clouds which fit within a still-visible grid of pencil lines, while Denyer’s is a low-key graphite drawing of a rocky pattern that evokes the impression of water moving across it in rivers or streams. In another context, the same imagery wouldn’t have said anything about the Great Salt Lake, but here it serves to highlight the fact that the lake doesn’t exist in isolation: it affects the entire ecosystem that surrounds it, from the snow packed mountains in Lois Breeze’s watercolor to Shirley McKay’s scene of Utah farmland. Such observations are not new: Clyde Cornick’s “Jordan River,” which depicts one of the three watersheds that feeds the lake, was made in 1940. Humans, with our farms, ski resorts, and other systems that rely on water cycles and flows, have always been just as dependent on our environment as the birds despite our ever-increasing influence.

Installation view with Clay Wagstaff’s “Clouds” and Lois Breeze’s “Skier’s Delight”

 

Rose Salisbury, “Gulls and Surf,” oil on panel, 23 x 31 in.

Part of what these naturalistic scenes create, as nature often does, is a sense of beauty and inspiration. But beauty and inspiration aren’t the only possible routes for discussing the state of our great lake. Arguably, as climate change continues to accelerate, as we continue to see the lake as essential, and as we’re learning more about the dangers of toxic dust normally kept under control by it, invitations for preservation may not be enough. Demands for change, and unsettling depictions, may be more fitting under what could become dire circumstances.

Spiral Jetty creator Robert Smithson was drawn to Great Salt Lake’s red color, created from the water’s halophiles. In 1972, he described the scene at Rozel Point: “… I closed my eyes, and the sun burned crimson through the lids. I opened them and the Great Salt Lake was bleeding scarlet streaks.” Such bloody imagery may resonate more with contemporary artists who are concerned about conservation and fear the consequences of doing nothing. As an introduction to the exhibit, curators quote a New York Times article written by the environmental activist Terry Tempest Williams to express its own positive reframing of our relationship to the lake—

“If we can shift our view of Great Salt Lake from a lake to be avoided to a lake we cherish; from a body of wasted water to an ancient body of wisdom; not to exploit, dam, and dike, but to honor and respect as a sovereign body, our relationship and actions toward the lake will be transformative”

—yet Williams’ piece as a whole is more nuanced than just this positive statement. Where the exhibition is decidedly focused on the idea of an “uplifting artistic oasis,” the article is grimly titled “I Am Haunted by What I Have Seen at Great Salt Lake,” and the photos that accompany it, shot by Fazal Sheikh, resemble Smithson’s bloody imagery much more than the calm, tranquil tone of the other artworks in this show.

There’s a clear willingness to choose a more confronting, disquieting tone from Williams, and a further willingness to put forward more potentially controversial ideas, such as the possibility of granting personhood to the Great Salt Lake. Details like this are relevant to the discussion if there’s any desire to accurately represent Williams’ perspective.

Liberty Blake, “As Waters Retreat, Great Salt Lake – Tideline Series,” 2023, collage on panel

The closest that An Uplifting Artistic Oasis gets to a darker, more fearful aesthetic is with the abstract form of Liberty Blake’s “As Waters Retreat, Great Salt Lake—Tideline Series.” One of the more recent artworks added to the collection, this piece is a collage of dry paper and cardboard with a mostly brown color scheme. The earthy colors help to represent the drying lake, which, as the title card states, has lost “60% of its surface area and 74% of its water volume.” Blake’s collage stands out because it creates a sense of loss through its plain emptiness in comparison with the other works on display. An Uplifting Artistic Oasis is curated to highlight what might be lost, with a focus on the beauty of those things rather than any resulting devastation. Instead of cities abandoned due to a future of unbreathable air, or dried up and abandoned farms, we see G. Russell Case’s idyllic “Sage and Shadow” landscape or J. Leo Fairbanks’ 1910 painting of Antelope Island.

This beauty-centered curation offers a positive spin to one of the more intriguing if ambiguous works on display: Mabel Frazer’s “Two Spirits Fling Goodbye to the Parting Day.” The painting shows two figures by the water, one with her arms gesturing leftwards, the other with her head seemingly shoved underground. Above the landscape are two groups of small clouds thinly spread through a large sky, the higher grouping creating an implied horizontal line of purple-pink forms under the lighting of a sunset. The title card describes the painting as an “interpretation of memory and landscape,” which “…brings two female spirits to life, symbolizing the deep, personal connection between people and land—a bond that holds memories, dreams, and wishes.” It goes on to say that, “through this work, Frazer invites us to reflect on our relationship with the Great Salt Lake, honoring its past and hoping for its preservation in the future.” These thematic elements of memories, dreams, wishes, and the invitation for reflection might not be as self-evident as they seem outside of the context of this exhibition. Alternately, we might see the spirits representing Night and Day in a humorous way, with the figure above ground representing the oncoming night and the other representing the day that is passing below the ground, just as the sun passes below the horizon. The title even suggests that the spirit representing the parting day could have been thrown away frivolously into the ground by the night—a negative interpretation which doesn’t quite fit with the idea of honoring the past, and, if we were to imagine the thrown spirit scrambling to try and get back up, might make the idea of a “deep, personal connection between people and land” more ironic. In the context of an environmentally conscious curation, could we not instead take the painting as a symbol of how we carelessly disregard the world we come from? Could we not read the oncoming night as a symbol for us moving into the future excitedly with actions that could harm what came before? If there’s any flaw to this exhibition’s curation, it would be a bias towards a safe, uncontroversial positivity with a subject that requires more nuance.

Mabel Frazer, “Two Spirits Fling Goodbye to the Parting Day,” 1930, oil on canvas

Setting aside the question of what aesthetic qualities might be most fitting or impactful in our current moment, it’s important that artists create work from multiple different angles and the one chosen by An Uplifting Artistic Oasis may be the best one for some of Utah’s people. Where a darker approach might be off-putting to some individuals, this exhibit may be able to attract people with a prettier, more welcoming aesthetic in order to subtly promote the importance of conservation.

David Blanchard

David Blanchard is an artist from Tooele, Utah, who graduated Summa Cum Laude from Utah Valley University with a BFA in Painting and Drawing. Beyond their surrealist oil paintings, they have begun an adventure into the realm of art writing.