Selections from 'Welcome to Salt Lake,' 2023, Photography
“We require a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origins, which reassures us about our end. Because finally we have never believed in them. ”
- Jean Baudrillard
The land between the Great Salt Lake and the Wasatch Mountains, known as the Salt Lake Valley, has been occupied by Native people - including the Ute, Goshute, Paiute, and Shoshone - for millennia. On July 24, 1847 the “Latter Day Saints” arrived to push out the Native population and found their Zion, initiating a rapid transformation of the regional environment.
Today, Salt Lake City is the Gesamtkunstwerk of late capitalism - a gigantic sprawl of box stores, fast food, parking lots and freeways. The automobile, the very symbol of American freedom, has become a straightjacket of physical and mental isolation. The only pedestrians are homeless and their presence is criminalized. The built environment is constructed to maximize social alienation while disseminating colonial mythology.
Schizophrenia, from ancient Greek meaning split mind, is a disorder of signification that generates chronic detachment from reality. Competing symbolic orders interrupt the ability of the human psyche to locate itself in a coherent narrative. Each image in this series attempts to embody a contradiction embedded in this urban landscape.