Anthropocene: Landscapes of Use, Memory, and Transformation

This exhibition explores how artists interpret and engage with the land—its forms, histories, and transformations.Through photography, sculpture, installation, and moving image, the featured works reflect on ancestral agriculture and land practices, modern infrastructure, environmental change, displacement, and ecological systems, while considering personal, political, cultural, and spiritual relationships to place.
The term Anthropocene is used to describe a proposed geological epoch defined by the profound and lasting impact of human activity on the Earth’s systems. This exhibition considers the landscape not as a passive backdrop, but as an active record—shaped by use, intervention, and memory.
Across the exhibition, artists trace the visible and invisible forces that shape place: extraction and preservation, erosion and renewal, habitation and displacement. In Utah and throughout the American West, landscapes carry layered histories of settlement, labor, and stewardship that continue to inform how place is experienced, remembered, and understood.
Rather than presenting landscape as stable or untouched, the exhibition reveals it as dynamic—shaped by competing uses, pressures, and histories. Salt accumulates, structures rise and erode, images document and distort. Across scales—from the intimate to the monumental—artists examine how human presence alters not only the physical environment, but also our cultural, political, and spiritual relationships to it.
Across these works, landscape emerges as both subject and consequence—shaped not only by natural forces, but by the persistent imprint of human presence.
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