John Arndt
The strange sights and sounds of John Arndt’s show at Gallery 400, “Empire,” made me want to revisit Utah. Arndt, who lives in Forest Park, spent a monthlong artist’s residency at a former military base in Wendover last year. During a walk in the desert he happened upon a potash plant: large ponds, what looked like salt beds, and earth-moving equipment. “I wasn’t sure what I was looking at,” he says. “It reminded me of those antarctic photos of ships stuck in cracked ice–without the ship.” He found a supervisor, who was surprised that someone was interested in what he did and took Arndt out in a pickup, showing him how the potash separates from the briny water in the ponds. Intrigued by the crystallized salt, and informed that objects dropped in the ponds quickly become encrusted, Arndt later left a manual typewriter, a tire, and a cowboy hat on a pond’s shore for a week. These objects are installed with the photos he took and a video he made, along with other objects and photos–often of abandoned buildings and industrial debris–from other sites in Utah. A recording he made in various places, including the sounds of machinery, airplanes, and wind, can be heard in the gallery. The typewriter, Preserved, is especially intriguing, partly because it’s still recognizable. The tire, Bonneville Flat, recalls the Donner party, whose wagons got mired nearby in 1846, which delayed their arrival in the Sierras. All three objects suggest the passage of time and history.
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Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Preserved and a detail from Swat Team Meth Lab.
