Great Salt Lake Fence Posts

2020
Photographer, designer, artist

Artist book of photographs cataloging 108 fence posts at the edge of the Great Salt Lake on Antelope Island. 6" x 6". 124 pages. Digitally printed and hand-bound. Limited edition of 20.

Great Salt Lake Fence Posts was included in the 2021 Alfred Lambourne Prize exhibition, a program of the Friends of Great Salt Lake that celebrates diverse artistic expressions centered around the lake.

︎ Buy now

Great Salt Lake Fence Posts catalogs 108 decaying wooden fence posts at the edge of the Great Salt Lake on Antelope Island. The hand-bound book’s layout is straightforward, providing a simple numbering system to catalog each post in a sterile, scientific way. Each fence post is decaying in a unique way, some standing strong with tufts of bison fur giving them an almost human appearance, and others fully fallen apart into lumps in the sand. The book is intended to capture the art in these objects that were at one time utilitarian but have been destroyed by the unrelenting salt-, water-, and wind-influenced entropy of the Great Salt Lake ecosystem.

The photos were captured on February 29, 2020, days before the initial quarantines brought on by COVID-19. Viewing the work through the lens of its time, these depictions of 108 ways to break down while staying a regimented six feet apart have become, for me, a document of our global community’s experience of the early phases of the pandemic.