Artist Talk with Jaclyn Wright: High Visibility (Blaze Orange)

Join photographer and media artist Jaclyn Wright on the day her exhibit High Visibility (Blaze Orange) opens to the general public to learn about her and her art.

Wright shoots with a large-format view camera—the same heavy instrument used by nineteenth-century survey photographers—and uses it to make what she calls “in-camera collages”: composite images built in the camera itself rather than in Photoshop, layering archival photographs of hunters, surveyors, and officials with shattered clay pigeons, shot-up paper targets, and other materials gathered in the field. On the windswept floor of Utah’s West Desert, the most conspicuous color is not red rock or sage green. It is blaze orange: the shattered remains of clay pigeons left behind by recreational shooters on what the federal government calls “public lands.” For Wright, these synthetic fragments are evidence. They are also the raw material for one of the most quietly arresting bodies of work being made in the American West today.

Jaclyn Wright is an American multi-disciplinary artist and educator. Her work incorporates archival images, in-camera collages using a large format view camera, performance, and photographic installations. Her work has been exhibited at major galleries in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Her work has been featured and written about in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Foam Magazine, Hyperallergic, Light Work’s Contact Sheet, Huffington Post, Southwest Contemporary, among others.  She was a 2025 Artist-in-Residence at Light Work, a 2024-25 Foam Talent, and a 2023 Utah Visual Arts Fellow. She has received grants and awards from Aperture x the Creator’s Lab Fund, OD Photo Prize, PhMuseum, and the Film Photo Award. Her monograph High Visibility (Blaze Orange) was published by GOST Books in 2023. She received her MFA in Studio Art from Indiana University and is an Associate Professor of Photography at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, UT.