Paradox Formation (Halophilic 6)

The strata of the earth don’t lie still like the layers of an onion—they move, sometimes steadily, sometimes dramatically. They are moving now. We are walking around on top of the way they have been moving. Lately I’ve been on a deep dive into the geological role of salt. I spent some time exploring a region of Utah they call the Paradox Formation. A few photographs and prints from this work in progress are currently on view at Brew House Arts as a part of And Also Wide: Artist/Mother Lines.

Geologists speak of salt’s plasticity: the salt layers underground shift in shape over time as strata accumulate above them, and under that weight they re-form themselves to push walls and arms up towards the surface. The process has played a substantial role in shaping the spectacular landscape features of Utah. The area is famously home to the Great Salt Lake and the Bonneville Salt Flats—and also to a particular area they call the Paradox Basin. Some aspects of salt’s activity there are visible in the canyons, mesas, arches, and valleys; some have dispersed over the eons, and some remain in massive deposits underneath. As the salt layers reach towards the surface in this region, they carried up with them pockets of space for petroleum, which is drilled in the area today.

The Paradox Valley extends from southeastern Utah into western Colorado. I traveled from Pennsylvania to the Pennsylvanian Paradox Formation so I could roam around in this landscape, shaped by salt over hundreds of millions of years. The canyons and uplifts show the way the salt wall shifted upwards, displacing the strata that had accumulated above, and eventually dissolving. This process created the Paradox Valley, where minerals left behind made it suitable for agriculture. The kind of agriculture that takes place there now, though, is only possible because of massive quantities of water pumped in from the Colorado River. The salt tectonics of the Paradox Basin also cultivated large petroleum deposits, and there are a number of oil fields in the region.

Not far from this area is another salt formation, an immense deposit left by the evaporation of the Sundance Sea, which is mined by the Redmond Mineral Co. They were kind enough to let me join a corporate tour of the source of salt mined for a range of purposes, from culinary to agricultural. And of course they are a popular source in the region for de-icing salt, which facilitates traffic through the mountains all winter. (Petroleum and salt working together again.)

I spent a few days at Saltgrass Printmakers in Salt Lake City, printing monotypes over photographic prints. In a way it would be kind of tidy to think about printmaking as layering akin to the layering of strata in the earth. The reality of strata in the earth is more complicated, though, because—again with the salt tectonics—they don’t behave predictably. Things keep breaking through, seeping out, mingling and shifting. At best that would be a flattering way to describe what was going on with the printmaking process here, since I was getting as experimental as my very generous hosts would let me in mixing inks that might not actually have been intended to go together. Texture! And with so many thoughts converging here, it seemed to fit to get back to collage and printed book pages (this time from one of my father’s geology textbooks). Strategies and ways of thinking are resurfacing that were part of the way I was working when I first started out as an art student. Layers!

This is an ongoing project. A few of the prints and photographs are in a show that’s running for a little while here in Pittsburgh. I prepared this show in collaboration with a group of artists who are mothers like myself, and the long arcs of parenting have been on my mind. My curiosity about geology is a gift from my late father, who waxed surprisingly poetic when he would talk about how the features of the earth got to be that way. As parents we can’t help but cchannel things from our own past into our interactions with our own young ones. It’s hard to know what elements will live into the future—what will be buried, what will dissolve and what will erupt.

And Also Wide: Artist/Mother Lines opened July 18 at Brew House Arts. This is the new show from Flock Artist Collective, which is what we’re now calling the artist/mother group I started collaborating with at the beginning of 2022. (See more from this group on Instagram at @flock_artists .) There’s an old saying that while life may be short, it is also wide. This show reflects the organic forms of the lines that trace out our lives as artist/mothers—they take on many shapes, they’re always being pulled in multiple directions, and they often converge. The artists in this show bring together a wide variety of materials, strategies, points of view and life experiences, and we build bridges every time we work together.

If you’ve read this far, you deserve a treat. Email me at lorenzc(at)comcast.net and tell me you found this offer, and I’ll send you a free copy of the zine I produced for the show, which includes writings from several of the participant artists. They’re doing really meaningful work and it’s a joy to be able to play a role in getting it into the world.

Over time, I keep finding more of my parents in the way I make sense of the world. 

When you learn about the layers of the earth, it lets you see the ground you walk on differently. It’s all in constant, endless motion. 

My father was an airman, but he never lost his fascination with geology, and he would take any opportunity to tell my brothers and me about it. 

  Every part of it is shaped the way it is for a reason—because of all the time and changes it has been through.

We are all participating in cycles so much larger than we can grasp.

And you can pick up a piece of it and hold it in your hand.

The Countless Laughter of the Ocean: where it began

This seems to the only page I saved from a book I found in a salvage shop in California back in the 90s. When I came across it recently, I was kind of floored at how I had managed to forget it. I tracked down the article that it was drawn from, and you can download it here. It’s basically a status report on the pursuit of color photography, delivered by one Sir William Herschel, son of Sir John Herschel, the man who gave photography its name. At the time, some progress had been made on multiple methods of recording a color image, but none of them were fully viable. Herschel waxed poetic in accounting for the many efforts of the photographic innovator, recommending that scientist and artist alike face their frustrated endeavors like “the countless laughter of the ocean, upon which God’s great gift of light dances and entrances us.” So many implications for us over a century later, as our own endeavors are entangled with both the salt of the oceans from which life emerged, and the plastic that we’ve doomed it to host without end.

Refract Journal

2022 saw my first publication in a peer-reviewed journal. I’ll admit that one of the reasons I submitted photographs to Refract Journal was their title—hey, you like things that refract, I can set you up, right? But seriously, the journal is published by the visual studies programs at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the legendary base camp of daring thinkers like Donna Haraway, whose writing I’ve been spending a lot of time with in the past few years. So it meant a lot to me that the editors wanted not only to use the photographs but to give me editorial guidance in completing a legitimate article to accompany them. It’s not every day that people want to hear that much about why I do this work, and I aim to write more about it in the coming months. You can download the issue of Refract Journal or read online.

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Other

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Other was a show about the imaginative life of domestic spaces, the creatures we share them with, and the materials that hold everything together. The show was open for two weekends in August at BlankSpace, an artist-owned mid-renovation house in Wilkinsburg.

Earlier this year, Travis Mitzel, Lauren Braun and I found ourselves in a conversation about how plastics figure into our respective art practices, which are very different from each other. Travis has produced a number of very compelling projects about animals. He and I had shared a table at a zine fair last year, where I was selling my little books and photos of salt crystals, and he had some literature about his Anti-Extinction Company. On the table with our wares was an adorable, robust, pink-gilled axolotl in a clear Sterilite tub. Travis raises axolotls, which it turns out are much more numerous in captivity than in the polluted wetlands of their native Mexico. He’d brought one along as a representative of the company, which operates by selling water from axolotl tanks as an organic plant food. The proceeds help subsidize the creatures in their human-facilitated urban habitat.

You’d be hard pressed to meet an artist who can bring more to the table than Travis when it comes to the rolling catastrophe of the Anthropocene, and its impact on all kinds of species. He has an ongoing project about goldfish, through which I learned about how these fish spend a substantial part of their lives in single-occupancy plastic bags, being shipped around the world in massive quantities through the global merchandise logistics system. They’re sold, won, or given away in those bags, and dispersed into homes one by one. Consumers often eventually release them into the wild, and over time they’ve naturalized in waterways just about everywhere humans can be found. In the right climate, they can live twenty years or more, easily outcompeting many native species.

We’re all so used to plastics being everywhere we look that it can be hard to notice them, even when we’re looking straight at them. I’ve been photographing single use plastics for years, switching back and forth with salt as a subject; they have a lot in common. This year I started moving forward with a new way of bringing them into the same images, using polarized light. In the photos I’ve been making this year, salt and plastics collaborate in refraction. It’s the plastics that bring color into the images, through the way they bend the polarized light, which is reflected by the surfaces of the salt crystals at different angles. The photos are eventually printed on a variety of plastic substrates: lenticular images, synthetic fabrics, vinyl murals, or specialized light-diffusing photo papers. Plastics carry the images, facilitate the images, constitute the images. Like they used to say on those old TV commercials: we’re soaking in it!

We installed the show in a house that bore many traces of the people who had lived there. In its current state of mid-renovation, the floors were dirty, there was no plumbing, there were holes where light fixtures might have been and in all kinds of other places. There was a lot of grime and dust, and also a lot of subtle, elegant flourishes, in places like mantels, door frames, and partially buffed walls where cracks revealed layers of color from decades ago. Those were the kinds of things that inspired Lauren Braun when she saw these rooms and hallways. Her collages feature accumulations of drawings about the size of the palm of your hand—drawings of different kinds of shells and rocks, architectural interpretations of flowers and leaves.

The house is small in terms of square footage, but everywhere you look it has little niches and corners, which became sites for surprising encounters with Lauren’s colorful mobiles. The gently floating petals of color in these pieces are organic shapes cut from painted Yupo, a synthetic material that takes ink much like watercolor paper.

Lauren also creates unique three-dimensional accumulations that at first look something like bundles of strange flowers, or clusters of mussels. Each of the little rolls in these bundles started out like a painting: different colors of acrylic paint are swirled together in little hand-sized pools. Later, she methodically peels each one off of its surface, and video recordings of this process have won her fans among people who find ASMR recordings soothing. Lauren installed several of these constructions, entitled “offerings to the house,” into holes and crevices in the walls.

As you proceed through the spaces, you end up at the end of a hallway where your perspective shifts a little. As you approach it you see one side of an angle, and as you get closer, you see another side of it, where the symmetrical wall is papered with a mural-sized print of crystals in a color scheme that extends the lavender of the walls. This faces down at a pair of lightboxes that feature a coordinated set of crystal images. On one side of these is a low closet where two mobiles are slowly turning. On the other side is a nested cluster of Lauren’s offerings. These are echoed, across the hallway, by another set, the last piece you see as you leave. On the wall where this is inset, there is a pencil inscription that you can barely see, but if the light is right, you can read it twice: I’m gone. I’m gone.

The show was cut short. I had to miss the first weekend, and among those who visited there were multiple COVID cases; meawhile, my whole family came down with COVID on the trip we were on that weekend. So when I got back, we had to cancel the reception. Lauren generously covered the gallery hours, so a few friends were able to attend that weekend. We did have a pretty cool print piece made as a gallery guide, with a nice Riso-printed cover thanks to Steve Grebinski and Misfeed Press. The illustration on the inside cover was generated by DALL-E2 using a prompt that came from one of the discussions that Lauren, Travis and I had early on: living in this time of impending climate catastrophe can feel like the moment of low tide before a tidal wave arrives, and we are like people wandering across the too-wide beach, collecting shells and strange treasures, trying for the moment to be as present as we can. (Email me your mailing address if you want one or a few of these, we had a lot of them left over.)

Lenticular Photos: Halophilic 2.2 Fun Size

Have you seen the lenticuar prints in the shop? Here’s a little bit of background on these pieces.

About lenticular printing

These are lenticular prints, which use very small-scale prisms to visually merge multiple images. This type of printing became popular in the second half of the 20th century as a format for things like political badges, travel souvenirs, holy cards, and the kind of small toys you might find in a cereal box. Today’s forms of lenticular printing can merge dozens of video frames, create realistic 3D imagery, or even make the effect tiny and flat enough to fit on a postage stamp. The version you see here is the old-fashioned Crackerjack-prize type, which uses two matched photographs with different color effects. The two images are printed in precisely matched, alternating rows, which correspond with the linear lenses. Each little rib on the surface of the print works like a lens to refract what’s behind it, which will shift depending on the angle from which it is seen. As your point of view on the image moves, the image that each little lens directs at your eye will shift from one image to the other. If you’re viewing the lenticular images in person with binocular vision, each eye’s perspective will be slightly different. This creates the shimmering effect of these prints.

Hanging details

These prints are mounted on translucent colored acrylic, which will create a subtle color glow on the wall behind the image when the light is right. (This is artisanal small-batch laser cutting, which I do myself here in the Burgh.) They’re designed to hang casually, slightly off-square. If you want yours to be perfectly level, use poster adhesive strips instead.

Polarized light for color

The crystals you see in these photographs are normal table salt, which has crystalized in a shallow, transparent acrylic dish. This dish is then elevated above a light source, which has been coupled with a polarizing filter. This forces the light to come through in synchronized waves. The light then passes through layers of transparent plastics, which act as retarders. These not technical tools; they’re ordinary single-use plastics, mostly from product packaging. These are chosen for their ability to diffuse the light waves very slightly—just enough to create color effects that further refract when the light waves hit the salt crystals. The camera is pointing straight down at the crystals (and the layers of light, polarizing filter, and plastic retarders beneath them). There’s an additional polarizing filter on the camera that enhances the color effects, and rotating this filter shifts the range of colors that are visible.

Salt and plastic

In geology, the term “halophilic” describes elements of salt-dependent ecosystems, and salt formations are often indicators of petroleum in the earth. In our time, both salt and plastic are everywhere humans are, and most of the places where we are not. As familiar and close at hand as salt is, imagery of it abounds in cultural expression, from the enigmatic to the mundane. Plastics have become as inevitable as salt, and nowhere near as benign. What kind of poetics do we have for a world that is shot through with plastics at every level? What kind of stories could possibly fit the world we’re creating now? 

The average American produces around 286 pounds of plastic waste per year, or an average of 12.5 oz. per day.* That’s about three times the weight of one of these mounted lenticular prints. You can find out more about the life cycle of plastics at thestoryofstuff.com, and if you enjoy podcasts, search for For the Wild on your favorite platform.

Each image used in the Fun Size series is a detail from a larger photograph—specifically, from the series Halophilic 2: On a Molecular Level. There are more photos in this series than what’s currently posted on the website, so follow me on Instagram at @zatopa to see more! And don’t forget to sign up for my mailing list list to find out about upcoming projects.

* Source: K. L. Law, N. Starr, T. R. Siegler, J. R. Jambeck, N. J. Mallos, G. H. Leonard, The United States’ contribution of plastic waste to land and ocean. Sci. Adv.6, eabd0288 (2020)

Taking Up Space: Holding Space and The Most Possible Kind

In May 2022 I worked with a group of artists here in Pittsburgh to mount two related shows exploring the experiences of motherhood. The artists included Sandra Bacchi, Sophia Cardillo, Naomi Chambers, Carrie Smith Libman, Michele Randall, Megan Shope, Alecia Dawn Young, and Stefanie Zito. Most of us met through the process of creating these exhibitions, and our places in along the path of motherhood range from the parent with an empty nest to the process of birth itself—Sophia delivered her second child around two weeks before hanging the shows and wore her tiny newborn during her artist talk!

The Most Possible Kind came from perspectives on parenting as children grow and gradually transition towards independence. We made a short walk-through video of this exhibition, if you’d like to hear more about it.

This show takes its title from a poem by Bradley Trumpfheller called “Reconstructions.” The poem is composed of vividly sketched details, and as you read them they build up a sense of a moment that’s charged with promise and possiblity. Off in the distance there’s just the quickest echo of a mother’s voice, maybe in the distance, maybe just a fleeting memory. I wanted to stand in that mother’s place for a second: what does she know, what does she remember, what does she hope for the “most possible kind?"

This was a particularly meaningful show for me since it gave me the chance to bring some work directly to the Duquesne University community, where I’ve taught for almost as long as I’ve been a parent. At this time my oldest is a college student himself. The experiences of teaching and parenting students at this age during the past few years has kind of put the “loco” in in loco parentis. The challenges that these students have had to face have been so unpredictable, and they are preparing to take on their roles in a world that’s changing dramatically. We’re all constantly trying to re-find our footing, trying to orient ourselves towards a horizon that shifts as soon as we begin to lock focus on it. All of that has been on my mind as I’ve been working on the Halophilic 3 series. There were three prints from that series in this show, presented banner-style on Ultrasuede fabric. I also managed to find a spot for the Small Animal Sort series, which is all about the process of finding names for the roles we want to take on in the world, and seeing how those roles began in the imaginative experiences of early childhood.