Description
About this piece:
The title A Precious Bit Remaining refers to the present state of the Great Salt Lake, which is rapidly drying up, and whose ecosystem is in process of collapse. This bookwork is in the form of a reliquary for the Lake, referencing the containers made to house the relics of saints (often bones) in medieval Europe. The relic here is a bone, probably from a seagull (Utah’s State Bird), found by the Lake. Just as the bones of the saints were often encrusted with precious jewels, this bone is encrusted with salt crystals. The text pages are photo-collages combining my photographs of the lake and its surroundings with images of historical maps and documents about the lake that predicted, over one hundred years ago, that the lake would dry up because of the diversion of water for irrigation.
The cards inside of the top contain explanatory text about the collages. I have edited that text for length and divided it between the two allowed spaces on this form:
The Great Salt Lake entered western apprehension as a fable, promulgated by Baron de Lahontan in his 1703 volume New Voyages to North America, in which he told of meeting Indians who lived by a salt lake almost a thousand miles in circumference.
Great Blue Herons and Great Egrets are some of the ten million birds who pass through the wetlands east of the lake on their migrations.
The first Monograph of the U.S Geological Survey, predicted in 1890 the present state of the lake: the islands have ceased to be islands but are instead connected to the mainland.
The Great Salt Lake is a remnant of prehistoric Lake Bonneville, named for Benjamin Bonneville, whose expedition of 1832 was the subject of Washington Irving’s The Adventures of Captain Bonneville.
At the International Irrigation Congress of 1893, John Wesley Powell, famed explorer of the Colorado River and first director of the U.S. Geological Survey, warned explicitly and at length that there was not enough water to irrigate the arid lands of the West. The result, he said would be a “heritage of conflict and litigation” over the water rights. At the time of this writing, over a hundred water rights are in active litigation in Utah alone.
The background image is the lakebed at the Howard Slough Wildlife Management Area.
In 1904, Scientific American magazine predicted that the Great Salt Lake would disappear due to extensive irrigation. Doppler weather radar housed in domes scans the atmosphere for approaching storms bringing moisture – perhaps in response to Utah Governor Spencer Cox’s urging of Utahans to pray for rain to end the drought. Great Blue herons nest on platforms at the Farmington Bay Waterfowl Management Area.
Materials:
paper, digital ink, board, cloth, Tyvek, aluminum, bone, salt
About the artist:
Lives & works in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
Jim Frazer is an artist living in Salt Lake City working with a variety of media and materials. Originally trained as a photographer, his work translates digital imagery from his photographs and research into print or mixed media. After graduate school at Georgia State University in Atlanta, he was one of the founders of Nexus, which came to include Nexus Press, and now survives as the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. He has recently started making artists books; his photographic work is represented in a number of museum collections around the country.
