Hylozoic/Desires’s “Piscean Premonition” at Southern Utah Museum of Art’s “Salt Lines,” through Mar. 8. Image by Shawn Rossiter.

The Southern Utah Museum of Art’s Salt Lines exhibition places the fragile state of Great Salt Lake at its center, not through advocacy or policy-driven rhetoric, but through poetic, immersive, and deeply sensory works that settle into the mind like salt into the seams of everyday life. If 2021–2023 marked the DEI era in contemporary exhibitions—where questions of race, identity, and social justice took precedence—2024–2025 is emerging as the era of environmental reckoning, with Utah’s vanishing inland sea as the centrifugal force of artistic inquiry.

“Piscean Premonition” is an immediate and visceral work. Created by Hylozoic/Desires, the multimedia performance duo of Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser, it takes the form of a circular structure, stacked with Himalayan salt bricks, holding scores of ceramic fish. Their glistening glaze makes them appear freshly plucked from water—an illusion so strong that one almost expects to see the pile shift, a single fish twitching, its tail flicking in a final, futile gasp. Cast by UK artist Charly Blackburn from the freshwater tilapia, the fish serve as an omen of ecological collapse, referencing the mass die-offs in hypersaline environments—like our own Great Salt Lake. Fish have long been symbols of prophecy in myths and legends, omens of change. Here, they predict something altogether more unsettling: an irreversible environmental future, a tipping point from which there is no return. For visitors who find much of contemporary art too esoteric, too reliant on artist statements and curatorial explanations, Piscean Premonition requires no translation. The visual threat is immediate: a mass of living beings, gasping for breath.

Southern Utah Museum of Art’s “Salt Lines,” with Hylozoic/Desires’s “Namak Nazar” in the foreground. Image by Shawn Rossiter.

If Piscean Premonition is visceral, Hylozoic/Desires’ other installation, “Namak Nazar,” is more enigmatic, its message unfolding slowly. An aural sculpture in the form of a pillar of salt, the work merges science, myth, and history to explore both the doom of climate change and the possibility of redemption through inward reflection. A weathered wooden pole, partially encrusted in salt, holds trumpet-shaped speakers emerging like desert blossoms, broadcasting a layered soundscape—percussive instruments made with salt and songs recorded in the salt marshes between India and Pakistan, according to the artists. In their futuristic mythology, the speakers broadcast “an imaginary conspiracy theory about Namak Nazar, a particle of salt that spells the doom of climate change and offers redemption by looking inward.” A thin ring of salt encircles the seating area, subtly demarcating a sacred or ritual space for listeners, most of whom may find the message almost completely inscrutable.

If Salt Lines is about erosion—of water, of memory, of certainty—then the photographs of David Maisel and Alexandra Fuller serve as witnesses to that erosion, capturing Great Salt Lake at the edge of its existence. David Maisel’s Terminal Mirage series, taken from the air, presents the lake’s destruction as something almost too beautiful—a surreal, abstracted wasteland of mineral evaporation ponds, industrial scars, and unnatural hues of toxic green and blood-red.

Large-scale aerial images of Great Salt Lake, by David Maisel, mix with black and white photographs by Alexandra Fuller at Southern Utah Museum of Art’s “Salt Lines.” Image by Shawn Rossiter.

Where Maisel’s photographs emphasize scale and distance, Alexandra Fuller’s Dissolution series is intimate, tactile, elemental. Created using silver, gold, and dissolved salt solutions sourced from Great Salt Lake, these prints embody the lake’s own materiality. There is a romanticism to Fuller’s images—a tempestuous sky, a solitary dancer, their fabric billowing in the wind, a horseman disappearing into a dust storm, leaving only footprints behind. The lake, in her vision, is not merely a site of loss but of contemplation, of reckoning. If Maisel shows us the lake’s unraveling, Fuller asks: What if it is we who dissolve first?

Salt Lines is not an activist exhibition, but that does not mean it lacks urgency. The works do not plead, they do not argue—they exist, much like Great Salt Lake itself, in a state of precarious survival. Their impact is not in immediate action, but in slow absorption—the way salt infiltrates skin, the way sand lingers in the creases of clothing, the way something lost leaves an imprint long after it is gone.

Work from Alexandra Fuller’s “Dissolution” series.

Salt Lines, Southern Utah Museum of Art, Cedar City, through Mar. 8

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.