We went to the Southern California desert on a day trip and wandered throughout the Coachella Valley and Palms Springs to see a desert art exhibit called Desert X. Desert X brings the finest international artists to the Coachella Valley to create art, engage viewers and focus attention on the Valley’s environment. I was so excited; this exhibit only happens every two years and I have been waiting anxiously!
Halter by Eric N. Mack
Driving up to a deserted gas station artfully draped in stunning Missoni fabric was awe inspiring. I was mesmerized watching endless yards of fabric come to life in the desert air.
"Using the site of a defunct gas station at the edge of the Salton Sea, artist Eric Mack employs his distinctive language of material as gesture to create a living architecture. Silks and tulles have been stretched with rope tensioned to form a line in a space, or to reframe the building’s relationship to itself and its surroundings. The iconic Southern California car garage, draped and reanimated as a site-specific sculpture, brings something singular to an already-striking natural location. Halter offers its visitors a respite or site for gentle reflection that can be explored by moving between and among the folds of undulating, colorful and lush fabrics. It is at once evocative of an unfastened garment, vacant tent, or open umbrella, all fluid and shifting references that the artist has assembled as a physical embodiment of real and imagined desert wanderers. The project is made possible with support from Missoni." - DesertX.com
Dive-In by Superflex
The bold pink structure is both striking and massive against the desert landscape as it towers high above me.
“It was the unexpected discovery of an abundance of fossilized marine life more than 100 miles inland from the Pacific shore that led the early Spanish settlers to name this valley Conchilla, which means “little shell.” Because of a mis-spelling the region become known as the Coachella Valley, thereby stripping it of the reminder that 6 million years ago, what is now desert had been underwater and connected to the so-called Western Interior Seaway. For the Danish collective Superflex, geological history and the not-so-distant future meet in the recognition that with global warming, rising water levels will again submerge the landscape along with all the structure and infrastructure that made it habitable for humans. Rethinking architecture from the point of view of future submersion, their mission has been to create land-based forms equally attractive to human and marine life. Using the preferred palette of Walter and Leonore Annenberg, Palm Springs, and marine corals, Dive-In merges the recognition that global warming will drastically reshape the habitat of our planet with another more recent extinction: the outdoor movie theater. Here the interests of desert dwellers and sea life come together in the coral-like walls and weekly screenings of a structure born of a deep past and shallow future.” – DesertX.com
Lover’s Rainbow by Pia Camil
Birds fly over the rainbow, why then, oh why can’t I? It's just delightful to see a rainbow on any day, let alone one you can touch and feel!
“Set in two locations across the U.S.–Mexico border (Baja, Mexico and the Coachella Valley), Lover’s Rainbow is conceived as an identical set of rainbows made from painted rebar. Exposed rebar usually signals development, but too often in the Mexican landscape we see those dreams thwarted and abandoned. Historically, rainbows have symbolized rain and fertility. Located in desert territory, the act of bending the rebar into the ground is a way to re-insert hope into the land. .” – DesertX.com
Going Nowhere Pavilion #01 by Julian Hoeber
Round we go! A mini maze of circle bricks creates a unique installation that leads you right back to the start.
"Going Nowhere Pavilion #01 is a Möbius strip made from concrete breeze blocks in a variety of fleshy pinks and browns. Technically, the strip is a surface with one continuous side formed by joining the ends of a rectangular strip, but it has a direct relationship to methods of psychology. Famed psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s attempts to use topology — the study of geometric properties — to describe the human mind is a subject that Hoeber has explored for years. As with the Möbius strip form, what is inside and outside the self can quickly become indiscernible." - DesertX.com
Ghost Palm by Kathleen Ryan
A palm tree unlike any other in creative steel and plastic. As the wind blew the plastic branches hit against each other, replacing an otherwise familiar sound with an industrial replacement.
"Ghost Palm is an echo of a natural form — a meticulous reconstruction of the largest palm species native to California, the Washingtonia filifera (desert fan palm). Nestled in a plot of low desert, between the foreboding San Andreas Fault path and a line of tamarisk trees, Ghost Palm is a manifestation of the artist’s fascination with the tenuous balance between fragility and sheer power. Standing taller than 20 feet, Ryan’s version of this iconic palm is constructed with manmade materials: steel, plastics and glass. Windowpanes in the style of a Victorian-era greenhouse make up the tree trunk; an iconic midcentury modern chandelier becomes the skirt of the tree; its leaves, a facsimile of Mother Nature’s perfect creation, are recreated in the form of glittering plastics. Drawing directly from nature’s design, the piece is self-reflexively manufactured, contextualized by the environmental features of the low desert landscape. While it is a substantially scaled man-made structure, it is essentially transparent, almost invisible. It becomes visible only when it catches reflections of the sun like a faceted crystal" - DesertX.com
Specter by Sterling Ruby
One of my favorite exhibits, this bright addition to the already stunning landscape was hard to ignore.
“The artist’s fluorescent orange monolith, Specter, appears as an apparition in the desert. The bright, geometric sculpture creates a jarring optical illusion, resembling a Photoshopped composite or collage, as if something has been removed or erased from the landscape. The block acts as a cipher or stand-in, mimicking the form it could be — a shipping container, a military bunker, an unidentified object, an abandoned homestead. Fluorescent orange is traditionally used for safety, as a warning. Here that logic is reversed: a ghostly object, set apart from the natural environment, hiding in plain sight." - DesertX.com
Western Flag by John Gerrard
We got to this exhibit as the sun was going down. The bright light of the video drew in all eyes in the middle of the dark desert.
"Western Flag depicts the site of the Lucas Gusher, the world’s first major oil find (in 1901), located in Spindletop, Texas, now barren and exhausted. The site is re-created as a digital simulation, the center of which is marked by a flagpole spewing an endless stream of black smoke. The computer-generated spindle top runs parallel to the Texas site throughout the year, the sun rising at the appropriate times and the days getting longer and shorter with the seasons. The simulation has no beginning or end and runs by software that calculates each frame of the animation in real-time as it is needed." - DesertX.com
We didn’t get to see all of the exhibits but I can’t wait for next time! To see all of the exhibits and plan a visit, go to desertx.com.
...
APB
Comments