Opening November 14

What we leave behind.

We admire the West for its beauty. But what do we leave on it? Nationally acclaimed contemporary artist Jaclyn Wright comes to Western Spirit for her first museum exhibition. Created through years of fieldwork in Utah’s West Desert, High Visibility (Blaze Orange) uses debris gathered from public lands to explore the relationship between people and the land—and the traces we leave behind.

Seen through the work of nationally acclaimed artist Jaclyn Wright. Through photography, video, collage and installation, Wright considers the West as it exists today—the land, the people who use it, and the evidence of our presence upon it. Working with the same type of large-format camera used by nineteenth-century survey photographers, she connects a historic tradition of documenting the West with a distinctly contemporary practice.

Across Utah’s West Desert, Wright encountered shattered blaze-orange clay targets left behind at improvised shooting ranges on public lands. She began collecting the fragments, which became both subject and material in the work—and ultimately gave the exhibition its name.

Exhibition Highlights

• 25 works spanning photography, video, collage, and installation
• A large-scale mixed-media installation bringing elements of the desert landscape into the gallery
• Wright’s signature “in-camera collages,” created inside the camera rather than digitally
• Blaze-orange clay fragments gathered during years of fieldwork in Utah’s West Desert
• A connection to the history of Western photography through the large-format view camera used by nineteenth-century survey photographers

About Jaclyn Wright

Jaclyn Wright is a multidisciplinary photographer and Associate Professor of Photography at the University of Utah. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Harper’s, The Huffington Post, Foam Magazine, and Hyperallergic and exhibited across the United States, Europe, and Japan.