No Lake Missing / with Stephanie Lee
2016 / HD video, installation /
No Lake Missing examines the narrative of territory and border as it relates to the Great Salt Lake, a major economic resource and recreational site for the state of Utah and the site of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. The work has its starting point at the Lucin Cutoff, a manmade causeway built by Morrison-Knudsen in the 1950s that divided the lake into two distinct regions with their own ecologies, appearances, and characters. Originally the causeway had two openings where the water could flow freely, but in 2011 these passages were filled, further alienating these bodies of water by actively preventing water flow between the two arms. The work speculates on the death of the Great Salt Lake and imagines the impossible act of collecting the lake as a way of preservation.
The work incorporates different ways of seeing the lake and experiencing the landscape—simultaneously presenting aerial vs. experiential view with their own distinct paces of movement. The vertical and horizontal scale in the video offer a way of seeing the landscape around the lake in two different times. Neither of these images are aiming for objectivity, but for visualizing their own way of fixing the landscape in time with technology used. From the gradual and slow to the sped up aerial imagery, the juxtaposition of the two speeds alludes to the geological scale of time at which the Lake operates.