PHILLIP K. SMITH III

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 three hundred 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.

neville wakefield: You grew up in this part of the world, attuned to the light, the phenomenology, the variances in season and time, and all of those then seem to become embedded in your work. What was it like growing up in that environment?

phillip k. smith iii: Certainly, as a teenager, there are entirely different priorities in your life than to be staring at the shadow moving across the valley floor. A large part of my love for the desert came as a result of being part of the hiking club at my small high school.

Four years in a row, between Christmastime and New Year’s Eve, we would spend about a week in Death Valley. We’d camp at the same spot, and it was always a tradition on New Year’s Eve at the stroke of midnight to be standing on the salt flats about as far out as we were willing to walk. You just can’t deny the kind of power of those kinds of experiences of total immersion in that environment and light at that young of an age, and you can’t really understand at the time how that is going to affect your life.

I think that moving to the East Coast made me highly aware of the environment that I came from. I finally had some contrasts, so I came back with my eyes fully open. Perhaps fully for the first time. That was in 2000, so it’s been eighteen years of exploration and learning and kind of relearning about this place.

How was that experience reflected in the artwork that you were making at the time?

At the time I was mostly doing drawings, and I was still focused on architecture. I knew my real passion was art, but I did not yet understand what my voice or vision was. I remember that every day for three months I drove out to Salton Sea, and I would hike out in the middle of nowhere. I think it was then that I started really focusing and thinking about the environment. But my moneymaking opportunities at that time were via architecture, and it wasn’t until 2004, about four years later, that I had the funds to start thinking about creating sculpture and expanding my thoughts about who I was as an artist.

What was the first material expression of that, when you began using artificial light?

It was in 2004 when I made some of my first light and shadow pieces. That came from watching those mountain ranges shift from monochromatic silhouette to a highly textured three-dimensional surface. I was interested in light and the interaction of sunlight and how a work could shift and change over the course of the day.

That guided me for almost the first six years, and it wasn’t until 2010, when I was artist-inresidence at the Palm Springs Art Museum, that I did my first LED piece, which eventually gave rise to Lucid Stead in 2013, Reflection Field in ’14, and then Portals in 2016.

That combination—Aperture at the museum and working on my lifework pieces combined with Lucid Stead—is really what got the creative engine kicking for me.

Before we come full circle, there was 1/4 Mile Arc, which was installed at Laguna Beach and was a very different piece with a different interaction: it drew this boundary line between ocean and shore. How did that piece come about?

It’s an incredibly daunting reality of, a, how do you create something that can take on this scale, and, b, how do you create something that is more present and somehow even close to as beautiful as that meeting of the sky and water? It’s why millions of people head to the beach and islands every summer and just sit and look at the water for hours on end.

But I thought that there was something there, to somehow use the material as my graphite for this drawing—the general atmosphere of Laguna, and the sky and the sunsets and the noontime light. That’s when the idea for the reflectors came about, that the line could be extruded to become this more three-dimensional, present element.

The piece made that light and that beauty and atmosphere present. In fact, the Coast Guard were joking with me on the last night, when seven thousand people were out there on the beach, and there’s this gorgeous sunset, and everybody has their backs turned to the sunset because they’re looking at the reflection of the sunset in the work.

Probably the second most powerful moment was Monday around sunset, after we had taken the piece down. Another thousand people came out, not knowing that the piece wouldn’t be there. All of a sudden you have a thousand people sitting on the beach, and the only thing they were doing was looking at the sky. Looking at the water. It was an ephemeral piece, but it opened people’s eyes to that beauty that exists. Everybody is aware of it, but somehow the piece became a tool for viewing the environment.

One of the beauties for me was when it reformed as a total circle rather than a partial arc. In the desert it continued to speak to the connection between the ocean and the oceanic, and this other environment, which was itself at one point ocean.

I conceived of the circle based on what makes the desert a desert. It’s surrounded by these mountains that hold the weather back. The desert itself is almost a bowl already, so the thought was of creating this circular space within what is already kind of a circular space formed by the mountains to the east, west, north, and south.

There were three distinct differences between what happened in Laguna and what happened in the desert. One, it was a circle. Another is that the reflectors were angled at 10 degrees to have this distinct separation through movement between the land and the sky, reflecting just the land as you’re approaching it from the outside, and reflecting just the sky when you’re in the center.

The other was that, at Laguna, the poles of the reflectors follow the topography of the beach. I wanted to have an ultra precision associated with the circle. We went through a lot of labor to ensure that the tops of all the reflectors were level. For me, that undulating line at the beach rocked me out of the experience and sort of allowed it to still be this highly human-made thing. You could really just view the environment through it and not be jostled out of it by some kind of aberration in the purity of the form.

The precision of the circles also reinforces the temple aspect. It was also functioning as a record of the passage of time.

I really appreciate that thought of the temple, and even as we’re saying it’s a circle, there was an opening within it. It was facing toward the southwest. That was definitely purposeful. Some people used that as an entrance. Others didn’t, but I think it was important for it to not feel like it was a full Absolutely.

The other thing that was interesting to me was that the approach was carefully staged. One went through a series of thresholds, getting out of cars, and then walking on pavement, and then walking on the boardwalk that you created, and then entering that space. Why did you stage the approach in this particular way?

That was very, very conscious, in fact: all of the dimensions of that boardwalk and what the rhythm was of the wood that was laid out, and where it stopped and how long you had to walk on the sand to get to the edge or to the center of the circle.

It took a couple of minutes for somebody to get out of their car and walk out to the center of the circle. Within that short period of time, it begins to slow down people’s state of mind.

Somehow the boardwalk allowed people to be conscious of their stride and their footstep because you could hear yourself walking, but you also saw yourself walking on top of the desert. During that moment you became aware of the creosote, aware of the sand, but you hadn’t yet touched any of that. Until you got to the end of the boardwalk, which was exactly halfway from the street to the center of the circle.

For the last three hundred feet, you had to walk along the sand, and that first step off the boardwalk, with that foot crunching into the sand, was a very powerful moment for people. They’re recognizing, “I’m three hundred feet out into the middle of the desert. I probably have never been here before. I’m highly aware of my pace, having to slow down walking through soft sand.”

As they walk across, I think the eyes begin to lift and see the mirrored piece. You’d see the land reflected that you’ve just been walking through, and then passing through that threshold again, now highly aware of the spatial experience. From there, then, it’s all opened up.