ISSUE TWO. SPRING 2019
ISSUE TWO
SPRING 2019
A COLLECTION OF IMAGES, PROJECTS, AND THOUGHTS FROM THE STUDIO OF PHILLIP K. SMITH III
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What. When. Where Out Now: Issue Two
Mobius “Art & Activism” Artist Panels
“10 Columns” Installation
Limited Edition Printing of 1,000
PKS3 Studio
Bridge Projects, Los Angeles CA
SPRING 2019
APR 18, 2019
OCT 12, 2019 (OPENING)
Issue Two is the second publication from PKS3 Studio and Smith’s way of reaching out directly to collectors, curators, museum directors, supporters and friends to provide an open and direct connection to his work and studio practice. This issue includes an update of what’s happening at the studio and features essays from William L. Fox and Dr. Daniell Cornell.
Mobius is a one-day conference held on April 18 that will bring together thought leaders, artists and policymakers to engage, connect and share thoughts on evolving topics centered around art, politics, and culture.
PKS3 will exhibit a site-specific, immersive, light-based installation as the inaugural show for this new exhibition space opening in Los Angeles in October of this year.
An afternoon of Artist Panels at PKS3 Studio will feature a discussion on “Art in Public Places” with Artist Phillip K Smith III and Architect Francis Kere, moderated by Palm Springs Life Editor Steven Biller, followed by a discussion on “Art and Activism” with Musician and Founder of The Gift Horse Project, Rain Phoenix along with Meg Remy from U.S. Girls, Musician Jade Castrinos, and Poet and Activist, Sonia Guiñansaca. themobiusconference.com @themobiusconference
“From Lucid Stead: Prints and Works by Phillip K. Smith III”
Harrison Fraley “Practical Anthem” New Paintings on View
National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C.
PKS3 Studio
MAR 18 – SEP 13, 2019
APR 11 - MAY 11, 2019
From Lucid Stead: Prints and Works by Phillip K. Smith III opening at the National Academy of Sciences March 18 through September 13, 2019, featuring photographs (Focused Views), prints (Chromatic Variants), and a sculpture (Lucid Stead Elements). Shown for the first time together, the works are inspired by Lucid Stead, the seminal 2013 installation in Joshua Tree, CA. www.cpnas.org
For the duration of the show, the studio will be open Fridays and Saturdays from 10 am to 2 pm or by appointment via arlene@pks3.com This will be the largest exhibition of Harrison Fraley’s pigmented pharmaceutical beeswax-based paintings and the inaugural exhibition of an artist’s work at PKS3 Studio.
Credits: Photography: Lance Gerber Studio @lance.gerber Graphic Design: Mariana Pariani @girlpilot
Special thanks to: National Academy of Sciences, J.D. Talasek, Alana Quinn, William L. Fox, Desert X, Dr. Daniell Cornell, Harrison Fraley, Clayton Baldwin, Elder Art Services.
Cover: “Irregular 2,” Collection of Marguerite and David Wilson PKS3 Portrait (page 2): Kim Stringfellow @kstringf Page 6: “Lucid Stead Elements #1,” Collection of Susan D. Goodman and Rodney D. Lubeznik
PKS3 Studio. For all inquiries regarding commissions, sales, press or studio visits, please contact arlene@pks3.com WWW.PKS3.COM
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ISSUE TWO. SPRING 2019
Sketchbook excerpt from January 31, 2018 when Smith was traveling for his COS press trips from Milan to London for the opening of “Open Sky”.
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Lucid Stead: Chromatic Variant (Yellow)
“From Lucid Stead” Prints and Works by Phillip K. Smith III March 18 – September 13, 2019 at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington D.C. Shown together for the first time, From Lucid Stead includes the Focused Views photographs, Chromatic Variant prints and the first in the Lucid Stead Elements series. All of these works are inspired by Lucid Stead, Smith’s 2013 installation in Joshua Tree, CA where he transformed an existing homesteader shack into a mirrored structure that, by day, reflected the desert surroundings and, by night, shifted into a color changing projected light installation. Focused Views are detailed views of the homestead shack, drawing attention to the relationship between the weather-worn wood, reflection, and the environment. After taking these photographs, Phillip returned the cabin to its original state with one exception: He did not reattach the original wood siding he had removed, but rather kept it catalogued in his studio. These wood slats, combined with Smith’s paced color shift, became the basis of the Lucid Stead Elements sculpture series. The Chromatic Variants are a suite of prints depicting tight arrays of transparent colored lines that separate from and merge with an image of the desert with its color-tinted reflection. The colors echo the spectrum of light used in the windows and doorway of Lucid Stead, while white and black reference the changing light from day to night.
ISSUE TWO. SPRING 2019
Lucid Stead Focused Views: View 3
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The Focused Views are a series of photographs I took of Lucid Stead shortly before the installation was taken down. I had spent several months of intimate time with the project and had become interested in the details and cropped views of the artwork. Focusing in on the relationship of materials, reflection, and the environment, these photographs suggest the beginning thoughts of the Lucid Stead Elements.
—Phillip K. Smith III
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Lucid Stead Elements #1 William L. Fox, Director of the Center for Art+Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada, has variously been called an art critic, science writer, and cultural geographer. He has published seventeen books on cognition, art, and landscape, more than a hundred essays in art monographs, magazines, and journals, and fifteen collections of poetry. He is a fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and Explorers Club, and recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Science Foundation.
Doubling Down By William L. Fox
According to published surveys, you look in a mirror between eight and twenty-six times a day. If you are a male and you shave, you spend sixteen-and-a-half minutes on average in front of a mirror while shaving; if a woman, you may spend an average of fourteen-and-a-half minutes applying makeup and adjusting your personal experience in its presence. Artificial mirrors have been with us for at least 8,000 years, glass ones with metal backing for more than 2,000 years. Mirrors reverse the forward-to-backwards axis, which is why we think they reverse left to right. No matter, we are so adept at the mirror effect that we manage not to slit accidentally one’s throat while shaving, or to put out an eye while applying eye-shadow. We picture mirrors in paintings and photographs, and clad entire skyscrapers in them, sometimes inadvertently cooking adjacent buildings as a result. We deploy them in periscopes and lasers, but also in optometrist and dentists’ offices, and carnival funhouses. Virtually every vehicle hosts at least one. As a result, it’s difficult to surprise us with a mirror, but the slender and elusive Invisible Barn by the architect studio STMPJ that sits in a forest in the northern Sierra, and Doug Aitken’s fullsize Mirage ranch house in the Swiss Alps above Gstaad are examples of contemporary artists putting mirrors on structures in hopes of helping encounter reality in unexpected ways. Phillip K. Smith III’s temporary installation Lucid Stead is the most interesting of these interventions by several virtues. Smith was born and raised in the Mojave Desert, returning to his home terrain to practice architecture and make art after earning Bachelor’s of Fine Art and Architecture degrees at the Rhode Island School of Art. His early sculptures and installations used architecture as their inspiration, sometimes incorporating mirrors and lights with stacks of interleaved material, but Lucid Stead adopted an actual building for its armature. Using an abandoned “jackrabbit homestead” cabin (the name comes from the American desert hares that inhabit the land), Smith profoundly destabilized what you thought of a mirror. One of the last homestead movements in America, the Bureau of Land Management’s Small Tract Act of 1938 provided people with up to five acres in the Mojave’s Morango Basin for only a few dollars if you improved the property (most often by building a cabin of at least 400 square feet) within three years. It was an attempt to monetize what the government considered useless land, but veterans returning from WWII spurred a land rush and as late as 2004 there remained 2,000 of the simple structures. Many were one-room bilateral tripartite cabins—four
walls and a roof fronted by a door with a window on each side. It’s the most common face of a domicile in American architecture. Smith wrapped mirrored bands around the house that alternated with the original slats of wood siding. The effect in the highly isotropic environment of the Mojave—where everything looks much the same in all directions—was that you thought you were looking through the house. It was difficult to remember that you were looking in a mirror, a bit as if the Invisible Man had taken off alternating strips of bandages and revealed not what was behind him, but behind you. The effect produced an affect that left you betwixt and between. The mirrored structures by STMPJ and Aitken retained their visual integrity, despite open windows and doors through which you could see the landscape on the other side of the house. But the gestalt of Mirage as a house was so compromised by alternation of mirrored and un-mirrored planks that you had to concentrate to reassemble its condition as a house. You lost track of time, could literally get dizzy while performing this reverse prestidigitation, and in short experienced what you least needed in an isotropic space: disorientation. On the other hand, it was safer and more interesting than doing drugs. Additionally, Smith took an historical building as his armature, which meant you found yourself moving back and forth in time, between the old weathered boards and the slick mirrored bands, between the Old West and the Post-Rural, between homesteading and art-going. The effect at night was, if not as disorienting, even more complicated. Smith used LEDs to turn the windows and doors into solid panels of blue, red, yellow, green, orange or purple that slowly rotated through the palette. In between the boards and bands of mirrors white light leaked out, making visible the diagonal two-by-fours inside and holding up the walls. What by day looked like slices of a house hovering improbably over the desert by night became something both more solid but oddly eerie. Smith’s work has been compared to that of the earlier masters of the Light and Space movement in Southern California during the 1960s and early ‘70s, artists such as James Turrell, Robert Irwin, and Larry Bell. The linkage is apt, their spare geometries and use of both natural and projected light tinkering with the permeable boundaries of cognition and reality. Manipulating materials to make the world at once strange and beautiful so that we can perceive more of it is the useful task of an artist. Rearranging what we think a mirror does in the Mojave—an environment so alien to us that we stage science fiction movies on it because there is no objective correlative to contradict the imagination— is to double down on the question of sight itself. If we think that what we see is what we believe, then Phil Smith has given us every chance to question that assumption. This essay was originally commissioned by the Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences in conjunction with Smith’s exhibition “From Lucid Stead.” For more information, please visit www.cpnas.org.
ISSUE TWO. SPRING 2019
Lucid Stead at dusk
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For me, Harrison’s greatest quality is his dedication. He is a committed artist. He trusts his skills, yet seeks to further develop his practice daily. He is always questioning, yet happy to complete a work with incomplete answers knowing it may take a lifetime of work to approximate solutions. There is a freedom within his work that is contagious and alluring, resulting in paintings that are somehow perfectly resolved and unresolved.
—Phillip K. Smith III
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ISSUE TWO. SPRING 2019
Harrison Fraley “Practical Anthem” April 11 – May 11, 2019 An exhibition of new work at PKS3 Studio Curated by Phillip K. Smith III and Clayton Baldwin Working and living in Yucca Valley, CA, Harrison Fraley makes paintings, but refers to physical, 3-dimensional operations when talking about his practice: Pouring, scraping, carving, melting, smoothing. There is a visual weight to his work and an unquestioned bold pragmatism when it comes to mark-making. He makes, follows, believes, and forgives marks as he vibrantly lives within his process. Each work’s foundation is a black and white image, yet pigment weaves into his multi-layered works via pharmaceutical grade beeswax and directly applied oil paint. A chronology of making is covered and revealed freely in an effort to understand the intent. This will be the largest exhibition to date of Fraley’s work and is the inaugural exhibition of an artist’s work in the PKS3 Studio. It is Smith’s desire to expand the reach and impact of his studio across multiple disciplines through various means of support for artists, while seeking further to establish the Southern California desert as an important location for uniquely creative endeavors.
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Regular/Irregular Series
PKS3 Studio Open Studio. January – March, 2019 Offering studio tours and “Open Studio” on Saturdays during Desert X, PKS3 Studio welcomed a variety of collector groups, international guests, and an impressive lineup of institutions including MCA Chicago, Crystal Bridges, Art Desk and Oklahoma Contemporary, MCA San Diego, Weisman Art Museum, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Special thanks to those who helped in the coordination of these visits and those that shared their experience with others. For anyone interested in a group tour or studio visit, please contact arlene@pks3.com to arrange. Light+Shadow Works: Faceted Disks
ISSUE TWO. SPRING 2019
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The studio, as it’s currently set up, is like the two halves of my brain. One side is monochromatic and focused on light and shadow, while the other side is shifting color and reflection. Both sides are linked via light and change, though with very different understandings. One is analog and the other electronic. One side changes at the pace of the sun moving across the sky, while the other side visibly changes directly in front of you... from a reflective surface to a full field of color.
—Phillip K. Smith III
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The Circle of Land and Sky, Desert X 2017
ISSUE TWO. SPRING 2019
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The Circle of Land and Sky Thoughts on Desert X As I’m reminded each day by Google Photos of what I was doing 1, 2 or 5 years ago, I wanted to bring my Desert X 2017 installation back into focus. As Desert X 2019 is open and people are traversing the desert, I wanted to share an essay written by Daniell Cornell about The Circle of Land and Sky as well as a selection of photographs taken by Lance Gerber. Both of these gentlemen have been involved in my work for some time now and I appreciate the insight they have shared via their two different mediums. Many people have asked me about my opinion of DX 2017 and DX 2019. My attitude is this: No matter how you feel about the art, there is always the beauty of the desert right there in front of you. So, if people continue to traverse this desert searching for art, but discover the desert in the process, then the show is a success. I believe that much of the perceived success or challenge of each work is a direct result of its ability to take on the raw, vast desert landscape and its intense conditions. And like the sensing of the atmosphere between two conversing individuals, we can feel (immediately) the quality of the conversation between human endeavor and the environment. As it should be, each iteration of the exhibition will be different, and I look forward to DX 2021.
Carrying reflectors by hand across the desert sand.
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Sunset on the last day of Desert X 2017
ISSUE TWO. SPRING 2019
Phillip K. Smith III: Sublime Reflections
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Daniell Cornell, Ph.D., is an independent art professional, cultural historian, curator, and educator. He served as Fulbright Professor at University of Porto, Portugal, and has held positions at The New Museum, The Morgan Library, Yale University Art Gallery, and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. He is currently Artistic Director at Palm Springs Art Museum.
Dr. Daniell Cornell
The Circle of Land and Sky, Phillip K. Smith III’s project for Desert X is more than a site-specific installation; it is an intervention into the desert landscape. That is not to say that its location was not artfully chosen. The deliberateness of what cannot be seen is as important as what can be seen. In the Coachella Valley, a patchwork pattern of built and unused parcels of land results in juxtapositions of suburban density with large unconstructed sections of desert. Smith chose to place his sculpture near a busy intersection but within an undeveloped 180-acre plot owned by the City of Palm Desert.1 A wooden boardwalk path led from the heavily trafficked road, carrying visitors to the slight depression in the ground that was the site of the work’s installation. At the end of the path they arrived at a place where all evidence of the surrounding built environment disappeared from view. Of course, this apparent emptiness is exactly the point Smith’s work addresses: in spite of its lack of development, the desert is anything but empty. In fact, one might even say that this lack allows us to experience the desert’s full embodiment of the space, the way it occupies one’s physical and psychological experience. As the 2010 artist in residency at Palm Springs Art Museum, Smith created a contoured wall relief in translucent, sheet acrylic cutouts and color-changing LEDs that mined the effects of light, form, color, and space in the tradition of earlier artists who used abstraction, hue, and tonality to alter perception. However, he was already evincing an interest in moving beyond the visitor’s experience in a gallery environment through the dimensional layers of his geometric shapes that recalled topographic mapping, alluding to the shape of landscape. Most commentators of Smith’s sculptures point out that he is continuing explorations by artists in Southern California’s major minimalist movements of Light & Space and Finish Fetish. The Circle of Land and Sky extends both art traditions in its manipulations of space through the properties of light and the highly polished steel surface that capitalizes on its reflectivity. One thinks here of Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell, original members of the Light & Space movement, who use light in ways that appear to dissolve solid boundaries even as they conjure the illusion of substance and physicality. 2 Inspired by and working in the tradition of these west coast predecessors, Smith has been continuing their explorations of industrial surfaces to capture the play of light effects. However, whereas the earlier artists principally emphasized the perceptual optics of visual effects, Smith has focused on the special quality of light and its shifting ambience that the desert environment generates. Smith has said, “The desert is a place where the environment can be simplified to sky and earth, activated by light.”3 In addition, as in most Land art, another historical tradition relevant to his project, Smith reveals his chosen terrain, the desert, to be a sacred space. He constructed a shrine, conjured out of rock, sand, plants, animals, and sky. However, rather than erect a building, as in a typical shrine, Smith magically reinvents the environment itself through a poetics of embodiment. In writing about another sculptural project, Eric David identifies this “perceptual corporeality of light and shadow” as the heart of Smith’s practice.”4 Rather than simply present the desert as something to be admired or honored, he allows one to enter, experience, and be transformed by it. As art critic Jan Tumlir has written of Smith’s works, they represent his dual training in both art and architecture. The use of polished mirrored surfaces, especially, suggest the curtain walls of high-rise urban buildings.5 Yet Smith inserted this urban reference into the natural expanse of the desert, evoking instead the phenomenon of a mirage and the illusory optics of intense sunlight. The result, simultaneously minimal and maximal, is reminiscent of the way indigenous people have given shape to ceremonial places by inscribing them with geometric designs. Smith reimagines the landscape in The Circle of Land and Sky by fragmenting the viewer’s experience on the one hand and enlarging it on
the other. The sculpture consists of 300 ten foot high reflecting beams set at ten degrees in the ground to form a 165-foot diameter, monumental circle, a modern day Stonehenge.6 The beams lean out from the center, so they reflect the land on the outside and the sky on the inside. Viewers perceive the landscape as a series of fractured segments. Smith transforms nature through a close-up confrontational and dizzying point of view, altering one’s perception as his installation scrambles the desert floor and the sky and mountains in the distance. The coherence of landscape as a vista for contemplation is subverted by the more immediate experience of the viewer’s relation to the natural elements as both observer and participant. The sensation is heightened as viewers move toward the reflecting beams and find themselves mirrored in them and visually thrown into the sky or projected onto the ground. One feels both rooted in place and displaced by the fragmented reflections that break the horizon. An experience of the physical world transitions into one of artifice, blurring the distinction that historically has defined a dichotomous binary between nature and culture. That binary most often has been articulated in art through the philosophical tradition of the sublime, which associates the natural world with an awesome presence that overwhelms individual sensations to create feelings of anxiety and apprehension. It asserts the priority of the earth and cosmos over human endeavors. However, an inherent tension exists between the rhetoric of the sublime and human actors. On the one hand, an encounter with a feeling of nature’s excessive power diminishes the individual’s importance through an awareness of the inconsequential, fragile, and temporary quality of life. But on the other, it plunges the individual into a state of mystery where the self is negated so the limitations of the body can be transcended to achieve a higher consciousness. Smith’s installation seeks to reconcile these opposing experiences of nature. His is not the religious experience that historically has been associated with ascetics, who remove to the desert seeking the heightened private sensibility its austerity offers. Rather, his work enables the more spiritual experience that connects people to each other. He has explained that it is rooted in the consciousness that “...there are moments of universal beauty, of shared experience, of discovering experiences that bond all of us together as human beings. Light is most often at the root of these experiences. It’s these moments of beauty, purity, and universality that I’m seeking to create.”7 To say that Smith’s project is deeply humanist is an understatement. In The Circle of Land and Sky, Smith performs an extraordinary feat of magic—the desert’s essential elements transposed from everyday life into a spiritual gesture. He makes visitors to his site pay attention to the mystery that is the desert, drawing them into a revelation of the shared humanity we discover through the natural world. These are the stakes he has placed in the ground. This essay was originally commissioned by Desert X with support from Loren Lipson.
1. The intersection is Portola Avenue and Frank Sinatra Drive. 2. In an article for Artnet, Smith cites these artistic inspirations and is quoted, “I’m the next generation pursuing those artists.” The article also cites Smith’s enthusiastic embrace of Mark Rothko as an important influence on his interest in the luminosity of color. Alexandra Peers, “Meet Phillip K. Smith III,” Artnet (March 27, 2018). https://news.artnet.com/art-world/meetphilip-k-smith-iii-coachella- artist-instagram-1253594. 3. Franceasca Seiden, Interview with Phillip K. Smith III 4. Eric David, “Double Truth: Light Artist Phillip K. Smith III Plays with our Perception of Space,” Yatzer (January 9, 2016). https://www.yatzer.com/phillip-k- smith-iii-light-shadowworks. 5. Jan Tumlir, “The Desert of the Real,” Phillip K. Smith III: Light + Shadow Works (Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College, 2015), p. 26,” Whitehot Magazine (September 2016). https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/interview-with-phillip-k-smith/3504. ,” (September 2016). https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/interview-with-phillip-k-smith/3504. 6. Design specifications from a communication with the artist, April 12, 2018. 7. Seiden, “Interview with Phillip K. Smith III
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