In the 1950s and '60s, the Salton Sea was a bustling vacation spot, attracting crowds of tourists who came to fish, water-ski and enjoy acts like the Beach Boys and Sonny & Cher. These days, it's an environmental curiosity, a desolate place ringed with dusty flats, dead fish and ruined mobile homes.
"Everywhere you look there's a contradiction," says Nicole Antebi, whose exhibition "The Salton Sea Project" is on view at Kristi Engle Gallery through Saturday. Antebi first heard the sea was a "dead place." But when she looked it up online, she was surprised to find postcards depicting a gleaming yacht club and happy vacationers. Struck by the contrast between these idyllic pictures and the Sea's present-day reputation, she decided to create her own images.
"I just went to town and started making these little watercolor postcards and sending them out to travel agents and people with the last name Salton," she says, wondering, "What if this became a tourist destination as it is?" Painted in a loose hand, Antebi's postcards combine such cheerful invitations as "Experience the Salton Sea" with illustrations of a dilapidated yacht club, a half-submerged building and dead fish.
Both satirical and nostalgic, the paintings explore the contradictions of a place that has been characterized as an environmental disaster: an accident of greed, manifest destiny and poor planning. In 1901, eager to create an agricultural paradise in the Imperial Valley, developers diverted water from the Colorado River. Four years later, the levees overflowed, flooding local communities and collecting at the area's lowest point, a former salt mine 200 feet below sea level.
In the '50s, the sea, 50 miles south of Palm Springs, was developed as a resort. But it was flooded again in 1976 and '77 by tropical storms that destroyed most of the shoreside real estate. Without an outlet and fed only by agricultural runoff, the sea has since become saltier than the ocean, with strange ecological effects. Overwhelming algae blooms periodically trigger mass die-offs of tilapia, the only species hardy enough to survive in its waters. The fish regularly wash up by the thousands on the shores, only to spawn again the next season.
