Alkali Desert

The exhibition, Alkali Desert, arose from Torop’s obsession with Chapter XVIII of Mark Twain’s memoir, Roughing It. Recounting a stagecoach journey across western Utah, Twain enlivened an otherwise dull stretch by vividly contrasting his romantic notion of desert travel with the cruel reality (heat, dust, thirst, monotony, solitude) of the actual journey. Alkali Desert consists of color photographs made in western Utah as well as others displaced to the Hudson River Valley, near where Twain wrote many novels. These images were made in 2011-12 with a film camera, and then printed as 12"x18" inkjet prints.