International art invades the suburban Coachella Valley: The best of 'Desert X'
On Gene Autry Trail, Jennifer Bolande posted billboards that picture the mountain view behind them
Desert X is a site-specific contemporary art exhibition curated by artistic director Neville Wakefield. 16 artists have installed works in the Southern California desert, including Department of Art professor Jennifer Bolande.
“Desert X,” the ambitious exhibition of new site-specific art installations scattered around the Coachella Valley, is successful partly because the 16 participating artists mostly skirt romanticized desert clichés — or else they engage them, casting a skeptical or parodic eye. Perhaps surprisingly, none chose to consider the springs that made this corner of the desert bloom; but many works burrow into the area’s complex history and heterogeneous present.
The artists were selected by Neville Wakefield, 54, former curator of Frieze Projects, a program of artists’ commissions that is part of the Frieze Art Fair in London, and past advisor to PS1, the Long Island City affiliate of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Most “Desert X” commissions are clustered in Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage, but other projects are farther afield.
Illusion is key to Jennifer Bolande’s head-turning set of three double-sided billboards along the west side of Gene Autry Trail, a road leading in and out of the valley from the freeway. Bolande photographed the distant San Jacinto, Santa Rosa and San Bernardino mountain ranges, then enlarged the images to billboard scale. For one fleeting, disconcerting moment as you drive by, the wordless pictures line up exactly with the approaching view.
While the mountain contours match up precisely, the clarity, color and light inevitably do not. The quick drive-by sequence of three billboard moments is so brief that you can’t quite be certain of what you have just witnessed.
It’s like a flash-cut in a motion picture, subliminal in effect. A disjunction between image and reality is lodged in a path named for a half-forgotten cowboy star of movies and TV. The seamless fabric of experience gets torn.
Additional projects by Doug Aitken, Lita Albuquerque, Jeffrey Gibson, Norma Jeane, Rob Pruitt, Julião Sarmento and Tavares Strachan are also on view. The show is being seen as an art world answer to the wildly successful Coachella music festival, beginning April 14. (“Desert X,” continuing through April 30, overlaps with it.) While that connection makes marketing sense, in spirit the endeavor is more like a suburban version of the urban “Sculpture Projects Münster,” a once-per-decade exhibition of commissioned public art throughout the German city. — Christopher Knight, Mar. 9, 2017
Read the full article at the Los Angeles website.
Find out more about Bolande's work here.
Take a peek at our 2015 studio visit with Bolande here.