La Quinta Arts Foundation five-time scholar winner Phillip K. Smith III has gained acclaim for his large-scale public sculptures in California, Arizona, Virginia, Tennessee, and Oklahoma. Smith received national recognition for “Lucid Stead”, a remote site-specific art installation and ephemeral monument to light outside of Joshua Tree.
Goldenvoice commissioned Smith’s art for the 2014 and 2016 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival. Recently, his work was included at the Laguna Beach Art Museum in a show Art & Nature, and he also created a site-specific installation ‘1/4 Mile Arc’. He is participating in the inaugural Desert X (February –April 2017) with a site-specific installation ‘The Circle of Land and Sky’.
The Circle of Land and Sky defines a reflective space within the desert, composed entirely of the environment’s two most prominent physical characteristics — land and sky. Formed by 300 geometric reflectors angled at 10 degrees, the artwork directly engages with the Sonoran surrounding and the endless heavens. As the light shifts and the viewer moves through the installation, land and sky are separated, merged, and displaced, subverting one’s assumed relationship with the desert horizon. At times, the sky is pulled down to the land or the land lifted up to the sky, while the colors of the west may merge with the colors of the east. It is a constantly changing installation that can never be seen the same way twice.
Sponsored in part by the City of Palm Desert
TITLE:
THE CIRCLE OF LAND AND SKY
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LOCATION:
FRANK SINATRA DR & PORTOLA AVE,
PALM DESERT
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