It’s 2035 the Great Salt Lake is gone. In its place an entertainment company, Company X, launched a historical landmark amusement series, one of which is an individual experience with a small amount of the original Great Salt Lake water. For a small charge tourists can experience a replicated scene of the great salt lake and have their photos taken. The drive here may have been rough from the dust storm but it’s totally worth it.
In conversation with the historical tradition of tableaux and the ecological catastrophe at hand, with the loss of the great salt lake I Embalm Myself takes a satiric approach to relaying a future of faux lakes and bleached land. Interacting with the scene, the artist sits, stands, and reclines in a thin pond of super solution salt water. As the water interacts with the body it leaves salt “scars” across the skin leaching the water from the figure. The dying lake relinquished to nothing more than a kiddie pool, 10 gallons of salt water stands in, in all its artifice, as both the last drabs of the lake and a pitiful reconstruction attempt.
Christopher Woodward 