Some 16 artists, including Richard Prince, Doug Aitken, Lita Albuquerque, Rob Pruitt, Glenn Kaino, Will Boone, Gabriel Kuri, Phillip K Smith III and Sherin Guirguis disrupted the local landscape for an exhibition that runs through the end of April (those planning a sojourn to the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival will be able to get an art fix). The land art installation was part of the inaugural edition of Desert X, a biennial located in and around Palm Springs in Southern California. ‘I wanted you to be in that experience, and not think about the sky,’ he says. Those who did their research would know that from up above, the seemingly unrelated light-filled craters spell out the phrase ‘I am’ – but Strachan’s intention was not for visitors to see it from two different vantage points. Tavares Strachan’s interventions create the phrase ‘I am’ from above. ‘For me, the I is not about the self, but the extended self is everything.’ ‘I was thinking about humans’ relationship to the environment and how that’s changed over a million years, and either the connection or separation that we feel to the larger environment,’ says Tavares Strachan, the Bahamas-born, New York-based artist behind the project. The effect was almost like navigating the kind of terrain one would imagine would be on a planet in outer space. As darkness fell, 290 patches of light illuminated the ground, spreading over 100,000 sq ft – the size of two American football fields.
DESERT X MIRAGE HOUSE LOCATION PATCH
Hundreds of people gathered in an empty patch of desert in the Coachella Valley at dusk last Friday.