Dissolution
Silver-salt prints on Hahnemuhle cotton rag paper, 22x30
Editions of 3 plus one artist proof
Available for acquisition at Modern West Fine Art
Dissolution is a handmade photography series that contemplates Great Salt Lake at the edge of its current era. Made with silver, gold and a dissolved salt solution from the Lake itself, the prints in this series are tactile and elemental. Dissolution asks if perhaps it will be we, rather than Great Salt Lake, which ultimately fall apart.
The Dissolution series combines modern digital photographic technology with a handmade, decidedly analog printing process that results in prints that are genuinely one of a kind, and that bear the unique marks of the artist in that moment, the unexpected outcomes of working with “impure” salt gathered from Great Salt Lake, as well as some of the indescribable magic of this very old process. To create the prints, I gathered salt crystals from the Lake and made a solution in which I soaked sheets of cotton rag paper. Then, in a darkroom, I hand painted silver nitrate solution onto the salted paper, making it light sensitive. Silver-salt prints are one of the oldest forms of photography, made by contact printing negatives onto sensitized paper and exposing it to UV light. I toned the processed images in a gold solution, adding both richness, as well as archival quality. The final images are made of the literal elements of Great Salt Lake.
