salt water

by Tia-Simone Gardner

This visceral but elusive work exemplifies Tia-Simone Gardner’s use of layered processes to unsettle how we think about and know place. Although it withholds itself from being know completely, it contains a close-up photograph Gardner took of the surface of the Mississippi river in lower Louisiana, where levees built to facilitate navigation and oil and gas extraction have pushed saltwater from the Gulf inland. This saltwater intrusion has led to the destructions of coastal forests, especially cypress trees which store flooding water in the spring. Known then as Ghost Cypress, Gardner finds resonance in their haunting, in-between state—dead but not gone.

In exploring the in-between place where the fresh water of the Mississippi meets the saltwater of the Gulf, Gardner also points to the relationship between the river and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. As a liquid highway, the Mississippi, and its broad watershed became crucial to sustaining and expanding slavery in the US.