{"id":103305,"date":"2026-05-31T05:18:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T12:18:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=103305"},"modified":"2026-05-31T09:35:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T16:35:13","slug":"running-out-of-canvas-a-utah-artist-responds-to-the-stratos-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/running-out-of-canvas-a-utah-artist-responds-to-the-stratos-project\/","title":{"rendered":"Running Out of Canvas: A Utah Artist Responds to the Stratos Project"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Kate Ward, “Unquenchable Thirst,” 16×20 in.<\/p><\/div>\n

On May 4th, the Box Elder County Commission held a special meeting at the county fairgrounds in Tremonton\u2014moved there because so many people were expected to show up. Which they did. When the commissioners took their seats, they were met with an eruption of shouting and booing. After about thirty minutes, they walked out, retreated to a separate room, and cast their votes by video feed projected on a screen while the crowd watched. Their votes opened the way for the Stratos Project, a proposed 40,000-acre data center campus in western Box Elder County, developed by Kevin O’Leary, the venture capitalist known as “Mr. Wonderful” from Shark Tank. It would consume an estimated 16.6 billion gallons of water per year, in an aquifer that feeds the shrinking Great Salt Lake. Soon, the proposed data center and the protests that erupted in its wake were national news.<\/p>\n

In the days that followed, people were still absorbing what had happened. A few days later, a painting appeared on our feed.
\nUtah artist Kate Ward, who works under the name Toha Studios<\/a>, had taken an abstract pour painting she’d already made\u2014teal and deep green swirling together, flashes of gold, creating a fluid surface that reads as landscape\u2014and drawn 1,276 squares over it in Sharpie and black paint. Each square represents the footprint of a Walmart. The data center, she noted, would take up approximately 2,000 of them. She ran out of room on the canvas. “Imagine two of these paintings,” she wrote in her post. .<\/p>\n

15 Bytes reached out to Ward to find out more about the piece and the questions it raised\u2014not just about this project, but about political art in general and what artists can do to change the world.<\/p>\n

Ward is a multidisciplinary artist and poet whose practice draws on mythology, spirituality, and the landscapes of the mountain west. Her political work isn’t new\u2014she’s made woven textiles about Gaza and watercolors responding to immigration enforcement, each accompanied by a poem and a fundraising component. The data center diptych is part of a mini-collection she’s calling Save The Wasatch<\/a>; fifty percent of proceeds go to the water advocacy organization Grow the Flow Utah.<\/p>\n

The Walmart device, she explained, came out of a simple problem: she couldn’t picture what was being proposed. “I’ve never been to New York City,” she said, “so I don’t have much of a concept of how large Manhattan is. And an acre\u2014I have a rough estimate in my head but it’s still difficult to visualize.” So she reached for something most Utahns already know the size of: a Walmart. She’d aimed for 2,000 of them, but ran out of space on the 16×20 in. canvas. Which is itself a sort of statement about the proposed size.<\/p>\n

Ward titled the piece “Unquenchable Thirst”\u2014a double entendre, she said, for “the insatiable greed of the people who approved it, and also the fact that we don’t have the water resources to run something like this.” Water is where she keeps arriving. “Our mountains are lush and gorgeous because of the snow runoff we get every year,” she said. “And that’s really the biggest issue I circle back around to with these data centers: water.”<\/p>\n

The frustration driving the work is, she said, political as much as ecological. “The people, across the political spectrum, overwhelmingly don’t want this. Yet the commissioners and the governor approved it anyway.” Making the scale visible felt like one response to that. “A lot of it was the frustration over the fact that the citizens of Utah aren’t being listened to.”<\/p>\n

Whether work like this changes anything is a fair question, and one Ward doesn’t sidestep. She acknowledges the obvious limitation: political art tends to find the people who already agree with it. “I think this is often true,” she says. Gallery walls reach people who are already paying attention. Social media casts a wider net, she hopes, though she’s realistic: “Of course there are no guarantees, because algorithms can be so random.” What she pushes back on is the conclusion that limitations are reasons not to try. “When it comes to art, I don’t like to think about the limitations, only the possibilities.”<\/p>\n

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Other works in the Save the Wasatch series, including this 28×22 in. work, have not been disfigured by the artist.<\/p><\/div>\n

We’re curious what other Utah artists are doing in response \u2014 to this decision, and to the broader questions of land, water, and growth it represents. If you’re working on something, or know someone who is, we’d like to hear about it. Email us at editor@artistsofutah.org.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On May 4th, the Box Elder County Commission held a special meeting at the county fairgrounds in Tremonton\u2014moved there because so many people were expected to show up. Which they did. When the commissioners took their seats, they were met with an eruption of shouting and booing. After […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":103306,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-visual_arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/unquench.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-07 11:54:56","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103305"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103309,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103305\/revisions\/103309"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}