Puddles of black oil and bone nest on the far Northeast shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, a terminal body of water known for its salt and brine. These puddles are tar seeps, naturally occurring pits of unrefined oil that bubbles out of the lake bed from deep within the earth. Oil and Bone documents these voids on the flat shores of the lake. The images are salt prints, capturing the scattered remains of pelicans: trapped, stripped, and bleached to the bone. These birds fell victim to the black time capsule that is the tar seeps. When the water level of the ever shrinking lake is high enough, pelicans and other birds mistake the dark pits for deeper waters, crash landing into the “death traps”. The new corpses entice scavengers to risk the pits themselves, some of which follow the same fate. However as water levels fall, we are left to wait and see the new fate and data of these time keepers. While the tar pits may claim many lives, they also simultaneously act as passive historians of epochs, collecting paleontological evidence and storing it away in their sticky depths. Oil and Bone explores these same ideas documenting the present moment, preserving it in silver and salt; confronting the viewer with a scene of death that challenges one to see this natural cycle with both sombreness for the individual and inquiry for the mass.
Christopher Woodward 