{"id":89458,"date":"2025-01-08T11:02:13","date_gmt":"2025-01-08T18:02:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=89458"},"modified":"2025-01-09T11:23:22","modified_gmt":"2025-01-09T18:23:22","slug":"going-pink-tiana-birrells-2025-focus-on-the-shores-of-the-great-salt-lake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/going-pink-tiana-birrells-2025-focus-on-the-shores-of-the-great-salt-lake\/","title":{"rendered":"Going Pink: Tiana Birrell’s 2025 Focus on the Shores of the Great Salt Lake"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Still from Tiana Birrell’s video in “FEMA Climate Resiliency, Photography and Storytelling” at the Ogden Contemporary Art Center, fall 2024.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

For multimedia artist and curator Tiana Birrell, 2025 marks a pivotal shift in her artistic focus: an immersion into the complex ecology of the Great Salt Lake, with its briny pink shores as her muse. \u201cThe color pink has captivated me,\u201d she shares. \u201cMy relationship with this color has changed drastically since moving to Utah, and even more so as I delve into the lake\u2019s ecology.\u201d While her work will continue to explore the intersection of water depletion and data centers, her attention is now moving \u201cdownstream,\u201d both physically and metaphorically.<\/h4>\n
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Tiana Birrell’s work in “FEMA Climate Resiliency, Photography and Storytelling” at the Ogden Contemporary Art Center, fall 2024.<\/p><\/div>\n

Birrell\u2019s career has been shaped by her dual interests in art and environmental studies. Originally from Massachusetts, she earned her MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017 and an MS in Environmental Humanities from the University of Utah in 2019.\u00a0Since 2015, Birrell\u2019s artistic practice has been rooted in the relationship between data centers and natural resource consumption. Using the National Security Agency data centers in Bluffdale, Utah, as a case study, she has examined the enormous volumes of water siphoned from the Jordan River\u2014and, ultimately, the Great Salt Lake\u2014to cool data servers. Her work has visualized the often-invisible environmental impact of these infrastructures and imagined futures where water from agriculture, mining, industrial practices, and even lawn irrigation might be returned to the lake\u2019s shores.<\/h4>\n

This year, Birrell plans to experiment with new forms of artistic expression, notably bookmaking, alongside her established mediums of video, photography, and installation. “I am imagining art that can communicate these complex relationships between humans and more-than-humans. I am enlivened by the number of artists, writers, and other creatives who are bringing attention to the Great Salt Lake and its shrinking shorelines, and I am excited to join the ranks of fellow artists who are thinking about these large-scale issues. My work will continue to take the similar forms of video, photography, and installation; however, I am excited to experiment with a new form that I previously only dabbled in; bookmaking. I have several book projects in the works, as well as a few collaborative\/ curatorial book projects that relate to The Great Salt Lake and surrounding Utah desert.”<\/h4>\n

Birrell’s accolades include the 2019 Digital Matters Lab Graduate Fellowship at the University of Utah for her research on water and data centers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she co-founded PARC, a Utah-based artist collective, and became a Granary Arts Fellow, where she developed <\/span>Incubation Period,<\/em> a virtual exhibition enabling artists to create during lockdown. In 2021, she concluded her residency at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art with a solo exhibition, <\/span>the weight of a cloud,<\/em> which illuminated the environmental consequences of the digital cloud and critiqued its linguistic framing (see our review here<\/a>). <\/span>Most recently, Birrell co-curated A Greater Utah,<\/em> a sweeping survey of contemporary art in Utah that featured 28 artists from six regions across the state. As she continues her work in 2025, Birrell\u2019s evolving focus on the Great Salt Lake\u2019s ecology promises to offer compelling insights into the intertwined fates of natural and human-made systems.<\/h4>\n
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Still from Tiana Birrell’s video in “FEMA Climate Resiliency, Photography and Storytelling” at the Ogden Contemporary Art Center, fall 2024.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Birrell at her 2021 exhibition, “the weight of a cloud,” at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art with a solo exhibition<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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You can see more of the artist’s work at http:\/\/www.tianabirrell.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

All images courtesy of the artist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For multimedia artist and curator Tiana Birrell, 2025 marks a pivotal shift in her artistic focus: an immersion into the complex ecology of the Great Salt Lake, with its briny pink shores as her muse. \u201cThe color pink has captivated me,\u201d she shares. \u201cMy relationship with this color […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1601,"featured_media":89459,"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":[14,2204],"tags":[1972],"class_list":["post-89458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-visual_arts","category-whats-new","tag-tiana-birrell"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/Brinebed-Bones_thumbnails1.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-06 14:52:15","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\/89458","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\/1601"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89458"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89464,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89458\/revisions\/89464"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}