Artists in Focus: Studio Visit with Projects Gallery Artist Jaclyn Wright
UMOCA has launched a new video series, Artists in Focus: Studio Visits, to shine light on the studio practices of Utah artists. The series will feature interviews with current and past UMOCA Artists-in-Residence and artists working in Utah. The second studio visit in this series features 2022 Projects Gallery Artist Jaclyn Wright, filmed in her studio space in Salt Lake City, and Stansbury Island in the West Desert outside of Salt Lake City. In Wright’s exhibition High Visibility (Blaze Orange), she uses debris collected from gun ranges on public lands to explore the intersections of photography, capitalism, and colonialism. Employing original images as well as archival photographs, maps, and diagrams from the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library Special Collections, Wright investigates the supporting role photography plays in the abstraction of nature, a process that reinforces the codification of land use based on gender, race, and class.
UMOCA:
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself—where you’re from, etc?
Jaclyn Wright:
My name is Jaclyn Wright. I’m a Salt Lake City-based artist. My work incorporates photography, video, installation, and performance. I’ve been in Utah for about three and a half years, and I moved here from Chicago, Illinois.
UMOCA:
How does living and working in Utah inform the work you’re making for your Projects Gallery exhibition?
Jaclyn Wright:
Utah is very different from the Midwest. So when I first moved here, I was really fascinated by the diversity of the landscape, particularly of the desert. And one thing that sort of has informed my practice is the way that climate change is particularly visible in the desert and in Utah, more generally. This has to do with the Salt Lake drying up, increase in dust storms, wildfires, amongst other sort of extremes and natural disasters. And that has played a big role in shaping the type of work that I’m making and how I’m responding, particularly to the landscape here.
UMOCA:
You teach photography at the University of Utah, and your practice clearly incorporates photography, but there are also elements of installation and performance in your work. Can you talk about the different processes you use?
Jaclyn Wright:
I’m trained as a photographer, but my practice has really evolved over the last five to ten years, and incorporates not just images, but installation, performance and video. These things sort of manifest themselves in the Studio through what I’ve been working on more recently and what will be a part of this project, which is, in-camera masking with a large format view camera. I’m using laser-cut dark slides that I’m then inserting into the back of a 4 x 5 camera. And together those create a singular image on one sheet of 4 x 5 film.
I also visit the desert and photograph the locations that I’m pulling objects from and then create large-scale backdrops which I use for the installations as well as for video performances, which are also part of the exhibition.
UMOCA:
Your work contains references to the desert. What desert is it that you’re photographing in and why?
Jaclyn Wright:
When I first got to Utah, I was exploring the West Desert, which is located right outside of Salt Lake City. And I came upon some sites on BLM [Bureau of Land Management] land that were used for recreational gun use and target practice. This was something that I had not ever experienced before. And I was really fascinated by how the land was being used.
These sites are often littered extensively with the residue of gunfire, which includes, you know, not just obliterated rock and what is ecologically there In the desert, but also large non-biodegradable household appliances, such as television screens, dishwashers, refrigerators. The list could go on and on. And these are huge objects that are not easy to remove. And I found not just one of these sites, but tons of these sites throughout the desert. And began sort of frequenting them regularly. And trying to figure out how I wanted to engage with these sort of strange places and what was happening in them.
UMOCA:
Your large-scale photo collage pieces also contain what looks like archival imagery. Where do you source this from and what is its relevance to the work?
Jaclyn Wright:
In 2021 I received a grant that gave me access to Special Collections at the University of Utah where I began sifting through decades of archives that are taken from, specifically, the West Desert, and sites that I’m frequenting. And those images, together with the objects collected in the desert, are in dialog in the images that are included in the exhibition.
UMOCA:
Your exhibition in the Projects Gallery is entitled, High Visibility: Blaze Orange. Where does that come from and how does it connect to your interest in photography, land use, and the environment?
Jaclyn Wright:
I started to think about issues around gun culture, but more, specifically, I became interested in what I felt that these objects represented, more broadly, in terms of the culture of land use, the history of settler colonialism, the relationship to rugged individualism, and American exceptionalism. And I was thinking more broadly about the sort of visuals that I was collecting and how they point to broader issues of a laissez faire attitude towards land use, the absurdity of shooting guns at the landscape, particularly in a location where the climate crisis is especially visible.
One of the objects that I was finding frequently at these sites were clay pigeons. Clay pigeons are projectiles that you throw into the air and shoot at for target practice. And these clay pigeons are often made Blaze Orange by the manufacturers who produce them to stand out against the blue of the sky on a clear day to make them really visible. And so I began collecting these projectiles and using them in both the installation and also in performances, where I created a bikini out of the found clay pigeons from the desert.
I realized that my interest was both visual and symbolic in the way that I was attracted to the bright orange color. As I was walking around the desert cleaning things upI recognized that that symbolically relates to a lot of the things that I’m interested in, in terms of this idea of Blaze Orange being sort of in opposition of nature, and the relationship between the visible and the invisible.
UMOCA:
It seems that visiting these sites, wherein gun use, recklessness, and toxic masculinity are so visible, might be uncomfortable or discouraging. What encourages you to keep going back to these sites and making this work?
Jaclyn Wright:
I continue to go to these sites because I see a lot of contradictions happening at those locations that are relevant to what’s happening politically in the United States.