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 I see 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 (former Westminster biologist), 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 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, 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.

I offer this work not as elegy but as witness!