High Visibility (Blaze Orange)

Focusing on Utah’s West Desert, Jaclyn Wright’s work aims to illustrate the struggle between the natural world and its codification by bureaucrats, the visible and invisible and the ironies of fantasies of freedom and nativism on stolen land. Located on the western side of the Great Salt Lake, much of the West Desert, the ancestral home of the Goshute people, is managed by the Bureau of Land Management. The area is classified by the US Federal Government as ‘public lands’ yet significant acreage is privately leased for mining and cattle ranching and nearly one-third of the area is used as biological and chemical weapons testing grounds. The lake is rapidly drying up due to overuse and human-caused ecological change—threatening millions of migratory birds and the population of Salt Lake City. The remaining areas are open to various uses, including improvised gun ranges. The motif of the colour blaze orange is dispersed throughout the book as a nod to the most conspicuous type of debris found in the West Desert ranges—blaze orange clay pigeons. These aerial targets are painted this colour to ensure they stand out against the sky on a clear day and against a natural landscape. A colour created to oppose nature, not to be confused with it.