Laura Spalding Best has been studying and painting the urban landscape of the Sonoran Desert for many years now. Working with oil paint on metal and found objects, Best seeks to analyze and quantify the complex infrastructure that makes our desert cities livable while also appreciating the unexpected beauty that can be found in power lines and transformers or canals and highways set against a boundless southwestern sky. Through the visual metaphors of the oasis and the mirage, Best's paintings often reflect each other, distort, and even appear to melt from their surface. In this new body of work, Best compares the passing down of family heirlooms to the disastrous environmental legacy the next generation will inherit. The sinking landscape and the vessels that try to hold onto it describe a present and future of hopeful action and change being drowned out by inevitability, futility and complicity.