Someone should slap a signature on these things and call them art. Land art.

The Delta Solar Ruins near Hinckley, Utah, either tell the story of an ambitious but ill-fated solar energy experiment or, as at least one U.S. District Court judge would have it, a massive fraud. Beginning in the mid aughts, a Utah-based company promised to revolutionize solar energy by using sheets of plastic, referred to as “lenses,” attached to metal poles called “trees.” These lenses were meant to concentrate sunlight in order to produce large amounts of electricity. Over a ten-year span, thousands of customers bought into the vision, purchasing the lenses to claim federal tax credits and hoping to receive rental income once the operation began generating energy.

The project was never connected to the electrical grid, however, and there is no evidence any power was actually generated. In 2018, Judge David Nuffer determined the founders had perpetuated a fraud and were liable for the total customers had claimed in tax credits: more than $50 million. The “solar plant” has now fallen into disrepair, the lenses are in tatters, and the trees are crumbling to the ground like pieces a deadwood forest.

Sure, we could write this off as just another Utah multi-level marketing scheme gone bad. Or we could call it art.

We’ll tell Hikmet Loe to get started on the book immediately. The UMFA can begin scheduling tours.

Human interaction with the natural environment? Check. Entropy? Check. Charting the path of celestial bodies. Check? Using the vastness and isolation of the desert as both medium and metaphor. Double check. Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt couldn’t have asked for more in a land art project.

But, land art for the 21st century. These towering metal “trees” and plastic “lenses” scattered across the desert landscape evoke both a futuristic dream and the inevitable decay of human endeavors. The bizarre aesthetic of the site, with its incomplete and crumbling infrastructure, would transform the ruins into a sculpture of unrealized potential.

We could read The Delta Solar Ruins as a failed attempt to capture and control natural forces. The project takes on a performative aspect, drawing parallels to grandiose promises and the spectacle of unverified claims. Like an art installation that lures the audience with the allure of innovation and discovery, the solar plant’s strange, futuristic structures and dangling wires become part of an elaborate performance about belief, spectacle, and illusion. In this reinterpretation, the project is a commentary on the performative nature of progress and how narratives of technological salvation are often sold to the public.

At its core, the artwork would explore themes of environmentalism, the pursuit of innovation, and the disconnect between promises of technological salvation and the physical world’s limitations. The “lenses” might symbolize humanity’s desire to bend sunlight to our will, while the collapsed structures represent the fragility of these grand visions. The juxtaposition of hopeful, ambitious forms—aiming to capture boundless energy—with their ultimate failure would serve as a meditation on hubris and the consequences of overreaching technological dreams. Ultimately it’s about the seductive allure of utopian futures, and the ruins we leave behind when our designs meet the complexities of nature and society.

All images courtesy of the author.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.