An Artful Staycation
Your direct connect to Desert X
Written by by John Connelly
The fifth iteration of Desert X, a biennial exhibition in California's Coachella Valley, is now open with 11 site-specific artworks. Since 2017, artists have been invited from around the world to visit and select a location to present and construct their work in the context of the American Low Desert. Generally on view for nine weeks, the artworks then disappear while following a “tread lightly” and “leave no trace” approach to the landscapes they engage. This year, artistic director Neville Wakefield partnered with co-curator Kaitlin Garcia Maestas to emphasize the fraught relationship between “unadulterated nature” and “the effects of human intervention.”
Highlights for our team include Unsui (Mirror) by the multimedia artist Sanford Biggers, consisting of two sequined sculptures in the shape of clouds towering 30 feet above a nearby community center. Located in a historic Black neighborhood formed by forced displacement more than 50 years ago, these unabashedly hopeful symbols suggest freedom, interconnection, and unrestricted movement. The typically windy neighborhood activates the sound and visual impact of the sequins, while the artificial cloud shapes draw attention to the natural beauty of the desert sky and landscape.
The act of being together by Guadalajara-based artist Jose Dávila features 12 gigantic marble blocks extracted from a quarry a few hundred miles away across the Mexican border. The blocks feature smooth and rough-hewn sides and are stacked carefully but precariously in a Stonehenge-like ring of six pairs near a Desert Hot Springs wind farm. Their migration across the border and clever location near the sleek monuments to environmental technology suggest both the history of previous civilizations and the precarious future of our current one.
Allison Saar’s Soul Service Station is a small structure resembling a filling station that visitors can walk to off the main road. Leading to the structure built from recycled materials such as tin ceiling tiles, cast-iron pans, reclaimed wood, and glass bottles are tires featuring inspirational messages that embody the project’s intent to provide “fuel for the soul.” Presiding inside the station is a life-size hand-carved female figure, guardian of the devotional objects gathered around her created by Saar and local students to express community prayers and wishes for healing and hope.
Cannupa Hanska Luger’s nomadic installation G.H.O.S.T Ride expands upon an ongoing project to reimagine sustainable land-based futures through Indigenous communities engaging with innovative technologies. The work features Repurposed Technological Archaic vehicle (aka RAT Rod), a hybrid Westfalian Land Rover covered in mirrored vinyl and driven to various sites. Its accouterments include industrial materials, a tipi-like structure with ceramic vessels for collecting water, and experimental light and sound systems. The overall effect is both ancestral and futuristic, asking us to consider future societies living in attunement with land and water and, according to the artist, “what we may learn from the desert if we focus on its knowledge.”
All projects are on view through May 11, free, and open to all. The Desert X app is on Apple or Google Play.
