In 2017, the Coachella Valley in California hosted the
first edition of Desert X – a contemporary art exhibition featuring a profusion of installations set in the middle of the desert, contrasting with the surrounding landscape. This year, the exhibition returns to the valley with a new series of works, which will remain on display until April 21. Many of them criticize the current environmental and economic situation of the planet, issuing a stark warning that if nothing changes, the future will be devastating. Check out the 2019 installations below:
John Gerrard, Western Flag
Irish artist John Gerrard is known for creating real-time simulated images set against stark landscapes. He uses this approach to convey messages about how power works in society, exposing the intricate structures and overwhelming networks that dominate mass culture. Situated at the gateway to Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley,
Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) depicts the Lucas Gusher Monument, the world’s first major oil discovery (in 1901), located in Spindletop, Texas, now barren and depleted. The work acts as a stark reminder not only of the intentional exploitation and depletion of resources, but also of the energy used to return the desert land to its current state of artificial habitation.
SUPERFLEX, Dive-in
The artist collective SUPERFLEX, consisting of Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne Christianse, creates projects that are intended to be actively used. This encourages communities to participate and develop works to change their socio-economic contexts. Rethinking architecture from the perspective of future submersion under water, SUPERFLEX sought to create a land-based form that would be equally attractive to human and marine life. Called
Dive-in , the installation combines the recognition that global warming will drastically reshape our planet’s
habitat with another, more recent extinction: the open-air cinema. Here the interests of desert dwellers and marine life come together in the coral-like walls and weekly screenings of a structure born of a deep past and a shallow future.
Ivan Argote, A Point of View
Ivan Argote is an artist who creates installations, sculptures, and films to explore the relationships between politics and history that shape our public and personal lives. Titled
A Point of View , the interactive sculpture is installed on a ledge above the Salton Sea—the artificial body of water that was California’s largest lake for the past century. The concrete scales, placed near the northern shore of the sea, project the viewer into the landscape. Messages fixed to the concrete appear in Spanish and English on each step. According to the artist, the collected works function as sundials representing time in fragmentation.
Cara Romero, Jackrabbit, Cottontail & Spirits of the Desert
Cara Romero’s work examines indigenous life through a contemporary lens, offering a complex understanding of native life today, where women often take center stage. Romero’s new photography series responds to the ancestral lands of the Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, Serrano, and Mojave peoples. These images feature four special visitors, time-traveling Chemehuevi who have come to the ancestral lands of their sister tribes in the Coachella Valley. In Romero’s vision, these small but powerful figures have returned to remind us of our deep connections to the land, the stories it holds, and how we can live in relation to it.
Nancy Baker Cahill, Revolutions
Nancy Baker Cahill is an artist known for using drawing, video, original sound, and augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) to frame the body as an abstraction. The artist created two pieces in separate locations near the extreme poles of the valley. To the north, near the windmill farms,
Revolutions (pictured above) alludes to the energy harvesting we need to remedy a man-made crisis. The experience prompts viewers to ruminate on their own body within the space and landscape setting, dwarfed by the implied giant scale of the digital work.
Julian Hoeber, Going Nowhere Pavilion #01
The artist expresses construction with a spatial ambiguity where the interior and exterior can quickly become indiscernible. The work, including painting, sculpture and drawings, aims to present an image of the mind through a study of phenomenological consciousness. Hoeber translates this geometry into built form to investigate its relationship to human psychology.
Kathleen Ryan, Ghost Palm
This installation is a meticulous reconstruction of California’s largest native palm species, the Washingtonia filifera (desert fan palm). Nestled in a low desert terrain between the San Andreas Highway and a line of tamarisk trees,
Ghost Palm is a manifestation of the artist’s fascination with the delicate balance between fragility and sheer power. Standing at over 20 feet tall, this version of the iconic palm is constructed from man-made materials: steel, plastic and glass.
Postcommodity, It Exists in Many Forms
POSTCOMMODITY is a collective comprised of Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist. The duo’s project, which exists in many forms, emerged from in-depth conversations between the artists and homeowners in Palm Springs. The installation is a sound work inspired by these conversations and installed in a home, specifically Walter White’s wave house. The work seeks to amplify complex sensations that attempt to intimate the desert as a design element and object of attraction.
Eric N. Mack, Halter
Artist Mack uses a defunct gas station on the edge of the Salton Sea to employ his distinctive textile language as a gesture to create a living architecture. Silks and tulles are stretched with a taut rope to form a line in space and reframe the building’s relationship to its surroundings.
Mary Kelly, Peace is the Only Shelter
Mary Kelly has, since the 1970s, created work that countered the principles of conceptualism and male-dominated codes of representation. A central feature of the artist’s public intervention in the valley is the so-called Doomsday Clock, whose hands tick closer to midnight as militarism rises and humanity moves closer to self-destruction.
Armando Lerma, Visit us in the Shape of Clouds
Armando Lerma's mural includes several images of the American Southwest and animals, such as snakes, birds, parrots, fish, monkeys, shells, plants, flowers, and rock art. He selected these images to illustrate a story of migration and transit.
Cecilia Bengolea, Mosquito Net
Cecilia Bengolea is an Argentine performance and video artist who focuses on anthropological and urban dance forms and their relationship to nature, the elements, and figuration. Her piece
Mosquito Net is not a search for the universal beauty of nature, but rather a display of social street dance to invoke the spirit of animals and nature. This work is a consideration of how humans and animals (real and imagined) observe each other.
Steve Badgett & Chris Taylor, Terminal Lake Exploration Platform (TLEP)
The Solar Power Terminal Exploration Platform (TLEP) surveys remote bodies of water. First deployed by the artists on the Great Salt Lake, the structure has a modular design that maximizes its deployment capability in harsh conditions and inaccessible bodies of water. This floating laboratory, with necessary life support and research infrastructure, focuses on terminal lakes. TLEP examines these specific types of lakes precisely because they contain exceptional environmental traits, exemplified by the Salton Sea, which has collected decades of agricultural runoff, resulting in a particularly stressed ecosystem.
Sterling Ruby, SPECTRE
The
SPECTRE installation is presented as an apparition in the desert. The brilliant geometric sculpture creates a jarring optical illusion, akin to a composite or photoshop collage, as if something has been removed or erased from the landscape. The block functions as a cipher or stand-in, mimicking the shape of what it could be – a shipping container, a military bunker, an unidentified object, an abandoned place of residence. Here, this logic is inverted: a phantom object, separated from the natural environment, hidden in plain sight.
