three suns collective emerged along the banks of the mimbres river in the gila wilderness in 2021. the members are artists chris eide, meghan esther giles, and josh haunschild.

three suns's work was exhibited at the museum of texas tech university in 2022 and is part of the 2023 great salt lake anthology.

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one iteration of the ongoing oil jetty project is oil jetty (ram), a sci-fi lyric of our exploration and pilgrimage to the oil jetty at rozel point, which inspired artist robert smithson to create his artwork spiral jetty. our durational mixed media installation is centered around the concept of the discovery of a capsule within a dystopian landscape from a not-too-distant future, with a fragmentation of nonfiction personal, ecological, and electronic artifactual memories that we documented during our second pilgrimage out to rozel point, including interviews from various invested parties in the livelihood of the great salt lake, which is under an ecological crisis due to its shrinking water supply. the people we interviewed are as follows (in order of appearance and titles at the time of interview):

bonnie baxter-clark  director of great salt lake institute at westminster college

lynn de freitas executive director, friends of the great salt lake

hikmet sidney loe  educator, artist, art historian, author of the spiral jetty encyclo : exploring robert smithson’s earthwork through time and place

gretchen dietrich  executive director, utah museum of fine arts

shane  spiral jetty visitor

john spiral jetty visitor

jaimi butler  coordinator at great salt lake institute, westminster college

tacita dean filmmaker, artist, creator of trying to find the spiral jetty 1998, and JG , among other works

matthew coolidge  director, center for land use interpretation

michael d. vanden berg  energy and minerals program manager, senior geologist, utah geological survey

chris taylor architecture instructor and director of the land arts of the american west program at texas tech university

connor  spiral jetty visitor

additionally, as smithson and many others, ourselves included, consider the oil jetty tar seeps relationally to the la brea tar seeps, we found the place of great salt lake’s north arm encapsulates a primordial future as an embarkation point into an exploration of deep-time through fossilized, stratigraphic, physical and metaphorical digging in as many directions as we could during our travel itself, thus containing this expansion into a metal capsule of buried time.

the (ram) or (random access memory) film version of oil jetty includes video clips that were filmed during our returned pilgrimage to the north arm of the great salt lake and are to be randomized and repeated when played alongside the narrative audio file. the audio is a kind of oral cento, composed of a chorus of quotes from interviews conducted in the field, arranged and woven together to create a narrative script.

the capsule will be filled with glimpses of what we envision that season would look like from our particular experience at that particular point in time back in 2021.

clips of (ram) versions of the film can be found by visiting youtube or the great salt lake anthology.

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for more on great salt lake advocacy: support the creation of the great salt lake inter-tribal coalition and other indigenous initatives ; support traditional ecological knowledge (tek) ; give back to great salt lake ; decolonize ; support land back efforts for the numa, nuwuvi, nuche, newe, + diné, and land back + reparations efforts in general ; be a good steward here ; leave places better than you found them ; advocate for the freedom and rights inherent to all life including that of water + earth, etc. ;