SLAC’s Green Room Gallery is a celebration of visual art. The Green Room Gallery is a space for conversation, enjoyment, and reflection, but most importantly, it is another way for SLAC to support Utah artists. During the run of Very Like a Whale, we are excited to showcase the artwork of Nicholas Ioan Lazaroae and his project Great Salt Lake Bare.
Nicholas Ioan Lazaroae (b.1999) is an award-winning, Romanian-American photographer based in Northern Utah. Lazaroae's practice is centered on transcending the distance from subject to viewer in an atomized world by bearing witness to the range of human experience and a changing planet.
Most recently, Lazaroae was a resident artist with the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art at the Canyonlands Research Center. He is the 2026 recipient of the Alfred Lambourne Visual Arts Prize from Friends of Great Salt Lake (one of our community partners for Very Like a Whale) for his piece Way Of Life, which documents ranching on Antelope Island.
"For the past six years, my artistic practice has been deeply connected to photography, a medium that serves as a text for exploring and documenting the American experience by bearing witness. I see my bodies of work as profoundly rooted in compassion, dignity, and love for mankind and the planet. My own experiences as a first-generation American facing questions of belonging and identity directly inform my desire to document our society. My work serves as a starting point, sparking broader conversations to hopefully deepen connection and understanding in a time of manufactured polarization."
On Great Salt Lake Bare:
"Great Salt Lake is the Western Hemisphere's largest saltwater lake. Located in Northern Utah, it is the 8th largest terminal lake in the world. Scattered in each cardinal direction are farmers and ranchers who have worked on the land for generations, raising crops and livestock in a fragile high desert ecosystem. As a lake that once covered over 3000 square miles in the 1980s was reduced to just 888 in 2022, agricultural stakeholders have begun to take a more adaptive role in order to preserve their way of life. Great Salt Lake Bare documents the effects on the land in and around Great Salt Lake and the people that inhabit it.
A 2023 study from Brigham Young University predicts that the Great Salt Lake will dry up completely by 2028, creating potential dust storms that will dwarf Owens Lake in size and pollutive effect. The health of the lake impacts almost 3 million people, and ranchers are on the forefront.
Great Salt Lake Bare was initiated after a visit to the Fielding-Garr Ranch on Antelope Island in Great Salt Lake during a searingly hot day. The film and digital photographs shown are a few examples of thousands, and represent many thousands of square miles traveled by truck, foot, off-road vehicle, and horseback in the pursuit of documenting the effects of climate change on Northern Utah communities. Invaluable, perspective-shifting, and lifelong relationships have been built through vulnerability and a desire to seek understanding. The documentation will continue until it is no longer possible.
Great Salt Lake is a gift. It is a blessing. It is a challenge. And, it is a warning. Whether the communities surrounding the Great Salt Lake adapt or succumb is an increasingly relevant question, with a rapidly closing time frame for answers. Great Salt Lake Bare does not offer answers for the precipice they stand on, and instead encourages us to look into ranchers’ eyes and acknowledge a landscape in peril. It is a canary in a coal mine; as the suffering endures, the images become a plea."
Lazaroae is represented by Gallery 25 in Ogden, Ogden Valley Art Gallery in Huntsville, and Weems Gallery in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is an Eagle Scout.
Learn more about Nicholas and his work online at www.Lazaroae.com. Instagram at @NLazaroae
See Nicholas's art on display when you join us for Very Like a Whale now through October 25, 2026.
Tickets and information.
