Absence is Presence (Absence is the highest form of Presence – James Joyce). I think it applies to the absence of the water in the GSL.  The presence of the Tar Seeps is evidence that the GSL water has receded, which allows the tar to rise to the surface. The absence of the water in the Lake evokes its recent presence. Now we must restore the Lake or face the consequences of its loss.

An Ecological Reckoning: Tar Seeps of The Great Salt Lake

My intention is to show the weight of what is being lost, but also the eerie beauty that remains in a damaged landscape. This paradox of destruction and preservation is the conceptual heart of my work.

On the remote northeastern shore of Utah's Great Salt Lake, near Robert Smithson's iconic Spiral Jetty, there is a phenomenon that has captured my imagination: the tar seeps of Rozel Point. These pools of raw petroleum—ancient organic matter transformed by millennia of pressure and heat—rise through fault lines to spread across the exposed lakebed, creating what scientists call "death traps" and what is seen as portals between geological time and our current moment of ecological reckoning.

This series of work stems from my connection to the landscape and the urgent environmental issues it represents. The Great Salt Lake is shrinking. It has lost 73% of its water and 60% of its surface area. As the lake shrinks, more tar seeps become exposed—trapping increasing numbers of pelicans, owls, coyotes and other animals in its thick, sticky tar. Scientists describe these seeps as an indicator of climate change.

Each altered photograph in this exhibition aims to depict the pressures, changes, and entrapments that define our current environmental moment.

My first encounters with the tar seeps happened when I visited Rozel Point with Bonnie Baxter, microbiologist at Westminster University and director of the Great Salt Lake Institute, Jami Butler (Bear River Conservator), and Westminster College students in 2018. I created a temporary land art installation down the beach 300 yards from the Spiral Jetty. After dark, I captured the stark landscape illuminated by the setting sun and later by moonlight. It felt otherworldly. After dark, the sounds seemed to be coming from deep space.  I felt I might be the last, tiny human on Earth: alone but surrounded and held by so much open space. Freeing!

The Great Salt Lake is a keystone ecosystem in the Western Hemisphere, providing habitat for ten million migratory birds. The collapse of brine fly and brine shrimp populations occurs as salinity rises beyond their tolerance; the sharp declines in shorebirds including burrowing owls, snowy plovers, and Wilson Phalaropes; over 800 square miles of lakebed are now exposed, releasing dust laden with arsenic, cadmium, Hexavalent Chromium, lead, and mercury into the air inhaled by 2.5 million Wasatch Front residents.

I have embedded these facts into the material and conceptual structure of my work not as didactic messaging but as presence—the way the tar seeps themselves hold presence, preserving the bodies of creatures that wandered or dived into their embrace: freezing, drying, encasing information and emotion so that it survives the erosion of attention that afflicts our age.

— Trent Alvey

Artists Bio

ALVEY, Trent Thursby (Mount Pleasant UT, 11 Mar 1948 – living, Salt Lake City UT)

Alvey is a contemporary multimedia artist who utilizes painting, sculpture, assemblage, installation, and video & sound in her creative works. According to the artist, “...observing and investigating phenomenon — objects, marks, light, sound, color, form and periodicity. This is how I describe my work.” (Utah Division of Arts & Museums Website). In 1992 her radiantly-lit mixed media Toaster Worship (2000, UMFA Collection) was a part of the Out of the Land exhibition that traveled to The National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. She has exhibited widely throughout the US including BYU MOA, SMA, Finch Lane Gallery, Alice and Rio Galleries, Modern West, BDAC, UMOCA, Benrimon Fine Art in NYC and ShockBoxx Project Gallery in Hermosa Beach and Museum of Eastern Idaho. In 2015, she exhibited a sound installation work titled Our Common Voice, at the Parliament of the World Religions held in SLC. Phillips Gallery, SLC, has represented Alvey’s work for over 20 years.

Alvey is the recipient of the 2011 SLC Mayor’s Artist Award and the 2016 Westminster College Distinguished Alumni in the Arts award. In 2013 she was chosen as one of “Utah’s 15 Most Influential Artists” by Artists of Utah. Her work is found in the UMFA, SMA, Westminster College, SLC County Art Collection, and State of Utah Alice Art Collection. She is included in all editions of the book Artists of Utah by Robert S. Olpin, William C. Seifrit, and Vern Swanson. She is also part of the Utah Artists Project, the J. Willard Marriott Library’s digitized collections of selected Utah artists, also at the University of Utah. 

“Trent Alvey has done many brave and ambitious pieces over the years.  She continues to grow and experiment—often combining disciplines in enigmatic ways, one of them being her wave theory/physics installations in steel and neon.  She takes risks and always creates compelling and thought-provoking work.” 

– Dolores Chase, SLC gallery owner and art collector.