PKS3 Issue Four

ISSUE FOUR. SPRING 2020

ISSUE FOUR

SPRING 2020

A COLLECTION OF IMAGES, PROJECTS, AND THOUGHTS FROM THE STUDIO OF PHILLIP K. SMITH III

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2010

2011

2010–2020

Line to Circle Arc - Line – Arc Arlington, VA

Artist in Residence Aperture Palm Springs Art Museum Palm Springs, CA Torus 1

Spectrum I Indian Wells, CA

A Decade in Review Reflections on ten years of PKS3 Studio It seems appropriate in 2020 to look back on the last ten years and to also dream about what the next ten years have in store. It’s been an intense decade full of accomplishments that were large and small, temporary and permanent, public and private. The studio has been working hard to further grow and strengthen our network of collectors, curators, institutions, fabricators, and facilitators. Many of the projects on these pages happened because people like you shared my work with people you know. The connective tissue necessary for these projects to come to reality is strengthened by those of you that have shared, supported, and believed in my work. Thank you for being part of the posse. There is exciting work on the horizon, and I look forward to sharing it with you in forthcoming editions of this studio publication.

— Phillip K. Smith III

ISSUE FOUR. SPRING 2020

2012

2013 Lucid Stead Joshua Tree, CA

First Exhibition of Lightworks

Gradient Column Walnut Creek, CA

Faceted Disc #1 Smooth Operations Exhibition Lancaster Museum of Art and History Lancaster, CA

Where the Earth and Sky Meet City Hall Oklahoma City, OK

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2014

2015 Gradient Arc Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Mental Health Center Palo Alto, CA

Reflection Field Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival Indio, CA

PKS3 Studio opens in Palm Desert CA Studio moves from 4,000 sq.ft. Indio, CA location to 10,000 sq.ft. space in Palm Desert, CA. Artist in Residence Light + Shadow Exhibition Dartmouth College Hanover, NH

Lucid Stead: Four Windows and a Doorway Lancaster Museum of Art and History Lancaster, CA

Irregular Horizontal 1 La Quinta, CA Parallel Perpendicular Selected by City of West Hollywood for Public Art installation (scheduled for 2022) West Hollywood, CA

Los Angeles Times names Phillip K. Smith III as 1 of 3 artists in the paper’s “Faces to Watch” year-end article.

Four Corners Extruded Selected by Seattle Sound Transit for Bellevue Public Art installation (scheduled for 2023) Bellevue, WA

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2016

2017 The Circle of Land and Sky Desert X Inaugural Exhibition Palm Desert, CA

Portals Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival Indio, CA 1/4 Mile Arc Laguna Art Museum Art+Nature Main Beach, Laguna Beach, CA

Bent Parallel & Torus 9, Laguna Art Museum Art+Nature Laguna Beach, CA

120 Degree Arc East-Southeast Commissioned by Faena Art for Art Basel Miami Beach, FL

Five Installations Published by Laguna Art Museum and Grand Central Press.

Lucid Stead Element #4 Palm Springs Art Museum permanent collection acquisition Palm Springs, CA

Torus 9 The Newark Museum of Art permanent collection acquisition. Newark, NJ

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2018

2019 10 Columns Inaugural Exhibition for Bridge Projects Hollywood, CA

Open Sky & Reflectors Commission by COS for Salone del Mobile Palazzo Isimbardi, Milan, Italy

Detroit Skybridge Detroit, MI Lozenge 7 Brookfield Properties Washington, D.C.

Regular/Irregular Claremont Graduate University Exhibition, curated by David Pagel Claremont, CA

Flat Torus Variant 1 Mexico City, Mexico

Lucid Stead Chromatic Variants National Academy of Sciences permanent collection acquisition and exhibition From Lucid Stead: Prints and Works

by Phillip K. Smith III Washington, D.C. Harrison Fraley “Practical Anthem” solo exhibition at PKS3 Studio PKS3 studio begins showing work from emerging desert area artists with first solo show for painter Harrison Fraley.

Lucid Stead Element #7 Denver Art Museum permanent collection acquisition Denver, CO

Artnet Dinner Celebrating Phillip K. Smith III at PKS3 Studio and Artnet’s 30th anniversary.

Flat Torus 4 Toledo Museum of Art permanent collection acquisition Toledo, OH Mobius Art + Activism Artist Panels at PKS3 Studio “Art in Public Places” discussion with Phillip K. Smith III, Francis Kéré & Steven Biller

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Going Forward Looking forward to the next ten years and beyond, I see an exciting list of projects and ideas that are already in full swing. This page hints at just a select group—from large-scaled outdoor works to museum exhibitions to private commissions. This Summer and into the Fall will see the next iterations of my ongoing series, Lightworks, Mirrorworks, and Light+Shadow Works. More immersive scales are being conceived, while several projects harken back to my architectural thinking. I am happily confronted with new sites across the globe—from Mexico to South Korea to New Zealand. These sites and the flurry of continued ideas continue to push me as an artist. ONWARD!

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PKS3 STUDIO EXHIBITING ARTIST

Sofía Enriquez.

“Cambiando en Público” April 10 - May 9, 2020 Phillip K. Smith III is committed to expanding the reach and impact of his studio across multiple disciplines through various means of support for artists from the Coachella Valley and surrounding areas, establishing the Southern California desert as a world class-art hub thriving with creative endeavors, collaborative exposure, and shared spaces..

Please join us for the opening reception of the first solo exhibitions of artists Sofia Enriquez and Burzeen Contractor on Friday, April 10, 2020 from 5 to 8 pm at PKS3 Studio.

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I’ve been following Sofia’s career and creative process for several years now and I’ve collected a number of her works. I am honored that her first ever solo show is happening here in the Coachella Valley at PKS3 Studio.

—Phillip K. Smith III

Sofia Enriquez has been processing her life through art for as long as she can remember. Her first encounter with art came wrapped in the Roman Catholic Church where, as a young girl, she fell entranced with religious iconography and the androgynous faces of its portraits and devotional art.

When she was ten, a pivotal event would carve her own course through art. After heading to church for regular weekly mass one Sunday, and learning that it had been cancelled, her family was hit by a drunk driver on the way home. The accident made Sofia question her perception of God in a very dark way as she began to ponder the meaning of life. Her faith became steeped in the known, rather than the unknown.

She began to mine her surroundings, her life, and her passions to build a personal iconography, creating artworks with these motifs to express her own unique view of the world. This view evolved to include the bold and energetic styling of youth street culture that infused her upbringing in Cathedral City, California; a nod to the plump graphic lettering of graffiti; the recurrent paisleys that she would find in both rich and poor homes growing up that weaved an ironic connection between people despite their economic barriers; and the bright and vivid hues of traditional Mexican mural art.

After attending the Otis College of Art and Design, Sofia would return to her desert home. While working side jobs with her mother as a maid, she was given a donation of clothing from one of their clients. Grateful for the clothing, but not entirely in love with the fashions for their own sake, Sofia started to paint them, lavishing them with her dynamic, signature vocabulary, each piece becoming an individual work of art.

The line was called MUCHO and upon placing it online, the line sold out almost immediately.

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I wanted to start painting as way to express my emotions through imagery.

I don’t understand minimalism. I like the idea of taking up space on a canvas—of filling it edge to edge—and covering, layering, erasing, creating imagery on top of imagery. I’m building up and unearthing my own vocabulary of icons.

—Sofia Enriquez

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Ever industrious, and built of a mighty work ethic, Sofia continued to make art for public consumption. For the next half decade, she painted over 39 murals from which a populist, feminist, pro-equality message would emerge, weaving her high-energy palette throughout the Coachella Valley and Southern California, even touching upon Baja, California.

In 2019, Sofia experienced an artist’s dream come true when she was offered a coveted space on the grounds of the annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts festival, where she was able to bring her beloved paisley into three dimensional, larger than life fruition. The installation “MISMO” (“same” in Spanish) featured six massive wooden murals in the universally recognized amoebic shape, painted with the artist’s usual pictorial lexicon. During the event, friends modeled MUCHO clothes on the base of the sculptures.

Now, at 27, Sofia’s diving deep with a new body of paintings that belie the maturity of a woman stepping into her own vulnerability. What has unfurled is a sort of street surrealism wrapped in the symbolism of her life lived thus far. Grand scale canvases that express, “This is what I feel like and have felt.” Much like her murals, the works are dense with imagery. “I try to cover every inch,” she states. “I don’t understand minimalism having grown up poor and always wanting abundance.”

These subconscious self-portraits, guided by a rampantly colorful memory, provide fodder to be perpetually mined by the artist for clarity, understanding, and refinement of mission. For instance, in one piece she paints about an experience in which she suffered severe back pain.

She wanted to see it as a visual, rather than a feeling, and to present it in paint rather than keep it inside as a compartmentalized memory.

A house covered by a ray of red light symbolizes a recurring nightmare since childhood in which Sofia was trapped in a large Victorian house where everything was dark and nothing worked properly; a common motif in fears of abandonment. A lone dog becomes an avatar for the artist and her feverish work ethic. Spanish and English words appear: DEJALO (leave it alone) sidles up next to CONTROL, representing the eternal battle and waffling insecurities in the process of art making.

These works are compilations of the emotional experience Sofia has ridden these last three years, a sincere dissection of who she is and what she is doing.

After this foray into her soul, Sofia plans on taking her work back out into the physical environment where she will build interactive worlds, alive with her distinct artistic characteristics that people can be a part of and commune within.

Written by Kimberly Cooper

ISSUE FOUR. SPRING 2020

Sofia Enriquez working on “Muchas Cosas” at PKS3 Studio

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Burzeen Contractor working on the initial exhibition layout at PKS3 Studio.

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PKS3 STUDIO EXHIBITING ARTIST

Burzeen Contractor.

“Perpetual Light” April 10 - May 9, 2020

Please join us for the opening reception of the first solo exhibitions of artists Sofia Enriquez and Burzeen Contractor on Friday, April 10, 2020 from 5 to 8 pm at PKS3 Studio.

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Burzeen has worked with me for 15 years here in the studio. We’ve supported and inspired each other along the way. And so, I’m excited to share his first body of work, a series of prints inspired by the light and color of the sky.

—Phillip K. Smith III

The sky is one of our grandest common denominators. It is an omnipresent and universal connector within the collective human experience.

Our vision of it is not confined to geography or restrained by time or limited by our self-imposed social, political, or economic structures. It is also the ultimate creation, and creator, of light.

Burzeen Contractor has always been astutely aware of the sky’s power and importance. “Face the light,” his mother used to say in his native India, where, as a child he partook in daily spiritual practices with the family. These rituals of purification related to the five divisions of the day, all denoted primarily by time, but accentuated by the natural pulse of the constantly shifting sky. Everlasting and eternal, akin to the concept of God, the sky became integrally connected to the young boy’s spirituality, informing a relationship to the natural phenomenon that could be experienced no matter where he was at in the world.

After moving to the United States, Burzeen’s connection to the sky intensified; it remained an ever-present beacon of comfort and solidity.

He landed in the California desert, where he’s remained for the last 15 years, working alongside Phillip K. Smith III. Their shared interests in art and architecture coupled with similar educational backgrounds helped forge a symbiosis that continues to evolve to this day. Amidst the foreign environment that was stark, pristine, and wide-open, Burzeen was forced to reconnect with nature in new ways. His relationship to the sky evolved as he began to use light as his preferred artistic medium.

Burzeen started to record the sky daily in order to investigate atmospheric color and the subtle, ephemeral shifts in luminosity, tonality, and light that happen over time. But beyond mere documentation, his recordings also represented an accumulative experience of one man’s contemplation of sky—a perspective unique to him. The persistency of recording the same subject at different times also allowed for a distinct comprehension of the organic cycles and rhythms inherent to his specific viewpoint of the sky. He soon realized that although everyone perceives the sky in a unified way, his desire was to offer up a fresh way of seeing it.

Armed with his large repertoire of individual sky recordings, Burzeen started to explore their interrelationships, looking for spatial or temporal connections, that when layered, would result in a slice of light married from many moments into one construct, collapsing time and transition.

These constructs formed the foundation for the artist’s debut series of conceptual, photo-based works.

Wanting to go further, and intrigued by the notion that accurately depicting light and shadow has been a longstanding endeavor within the

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Burzeen Contractor with his 360º camera capturing a cloudy desert sky.

Western historical art canon, Burzeen further evolved his passion for juxtaposition. He subsequently overlaid these constructed moody selfportraits of the atmosphere with sharply precise cartographic grid lines, which were rule-based and injected with both logic and chance, in order to shape and frame the light of the sky. The lines became reminiscent of the cross hatching technique used by artists to portray light and shadow in traditional drawing and painting. The complementary combination of ethereal light and fluidity with respect to the crisp geometry of the lines gives the work an abstract quality, built directly from reality.

Burzeen has succeeded in his mission to capture the ephemeral quality of the sky. In doing so, he’s also managed to poetically express the dance between real, documented space and abstract, perceived space within a contemporary art lexicon. Furthermore, visually arresting in their marriage of the painterly and the scientific, these pieces evoke both a celestial mysticism and technical awe. But most of all, they compel our meditation on the dimensionless nature of the light above, a perpetual mystery to all mankind, and exhaustive source of ever-changing material for the creative mind.

Written by Kimberly Cooper

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ESSAY

10 Columns Essay included in the book assembled by Bridge Projects for Smith’s 10 Columns installation, which ran from October 11, 2019, to February 16, 2020, as the inaugural exhibition in the new Hollywood gallery space.

Primordial Light

By Dan Cameron Dan Cameron is a New York-based independent curator, art writer, archivist, and educator. He founded Prospect New Orleans, was Artistic Director of Open Spaces in Kansas City in 2018, and a year prior served as guest curator of Kinesthesia: Latin American Kinetic Art 1954-1969 at Palm Springs Art Museum, part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time initiative. Cameron served as senior curator at the New Museum from 1995 to 2006, was Director of Visual Arts at New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center from 2007 to 2010, Chief Curator at Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach from 2012-2015, and Curator of the 2016 Bienal de Cuenca in Ecuador.

One of the knottier mental exercises in basic physics comes from trying to imagine measuring, or even experiencing, light and space in terms apart from one’s effect on the other. To be sure, there is no mistaking the two realms in the abstract. But while we possess the mental capacity to conceive of space as something we might be able to navigate in the total absence of light—blind people do it—the same concept doesn’t apply if we contemplate light as a phenomenon that would still be real if there was no space where it could shine. The two are so fully and inextricably intertwined that sighted people generally feel pretty confident we know what we are seeing when we experience an illuminated space because our entire sentient lives have been spent navigating a seamless fusion of these two elements as if they were a single entity. You enter a dark room, turn on the light or open the curtains, and voila!—space and light instantly snap into perfect formation.

For most of our collective existence, the control of light and its movement through space was tied to our conquest of fire. This is why the narrative of Iron Age humans creating the earliest cave art by the flickering light of torches is so compelling to us thousands of years later. Most of us, at some point in our lives, have fallen under the mysterious spell a campfire or a shimmering nighttime panoply of stars has on our human imagination. We might even construct a viable argument that our string of qualified successes at controlling the movement of light through space is one of the weightiest hallmarks we employ without hesitation to define the project of human civilization. From the life-saving regulations of lighthouses, airports, and traffic lights to the benign amusements of movies, smart phones, television, and video games, we seem to feel secure being surrounded by the tools and infrastructure that permit us to shape and organize all of the moving, blinking fragments of our immediate surroundings.

Because it’s not technically possible to pry space and light apart to observe or deploy their properties separately, an international network of artists that has gradually expanded over the past half-century has focused their collective attention on the possibility of developing interactions between the two realms in order to destabilize the perceptual mechanism by which light—in concert with its handmaiden, color—acts to reinforce the solidity of space and form. Although far from household names, two important precursors of this development are the American artist Thomas Wilfred (1889—1968) and Brazilian artist Abraham Palatnik (b. 1928). Wilfred began in the 1930s to create a series of Lumia sculptures that seemed to compress the colors and shapes of the aurora borealis into console form. In the early 1950s, Palatnik started making installations and motorized sculptures that confronted viewers with semi-translucent screens behind which a smooth interplay of lights, tracks, switches, and conveyor belts created the visual impression of miniature abstract worlds populated by illuminated biomorphic shapes that swam in slow motion through fields of glowing and receding colors. Although both artists used electricity to generate colorful pulsing movement that had certain artistic roots in European modernism (i.e., Marcel Duchamp, Naum Gabo), their fusion of the kinetic and the illuminated appears all the more groundbreaking to our twenty-first century eyes.

By the late 1960s, a small group of artists in Southern California found their individual practices overlapping in process and intent as each developed an approach soon dubbed Light and Space, precisely for its concentration on isolating the two elements as much as possible from solid form. Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Larry Bell, and Doug Wheeler forged a collective ap-

proach through which they treated light itself as a primary material, signifying a shift in visual attention that had a profound impact on the perception of art by giving its environmental context greater attention. Concurrently, New York artist Dan Flavin developed a tangent of Minimal Art that used fluorescent light fixtures to similar ends, while Fred Sandback began quietly implying the presence of solid forms in space simply by stretching taut lengths of colored yarn between fixed points in a room. In all of these cases, the viewer’s attention was not drawn to any solid presence within a fixed space but to the overall impact of light, color, line, and/or shadow onto surrounding walls, ceiling, and floors. While there are important stylistic differences among all involved, the Light and Space generation and certain New York Minimalists helped link the idea of industrially-scaled architecture with the gradual dematerialization of the art object itself, a quest that continued unfolding well into the 1980s.

The potential to merge light and architectural space attained heightened levels of interest and engagement as computer software and LED lighting gradually took the place of pulleys, dimmers, fuses, and other remnants of the analog age, and this lacuna marks the precise cultural zone into which artist Phillip K. Smith III seems to be locating his delicately-calibrated 10 Columns installation. As it pertains to the technological transformations that increasingly define our era, we now have at our fingertips far more capabilities than we can ever have imagined. Yet, because of this very same proliferation, it has become all but impossible for a non-specialist to fully appreciate the unique characteristics and boundless variations of so many simultaneous developments. Absent any clear potential for astonishment, the panorama of technological miracles unfolding around us can easily become an obstacle course of distraction, a gateway drug to prolonged states of mental passivity and social isolation. We haven’t lost a taste for the marvelous or the sublime but we do seem to have succumbed to the myth that such experiences are instantly available, if we just keep scrolling.

Entering Smith’s 10 Columns, we aren’t immediately aware of the technology’s sophistication because how light is generated within the architecture sets

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Los Angeles Times Amongst the coverage of the show was this full page review in the LA Times by David Pagel.

Sunday, November 12, 2019

Bridge Project The novices of Saint Michael’s Abbey sang Gregorian chants to close out the final day of the 10 Columns installation.

10 Columns Book Designed to be at the scale of a small prayer book, the 10 Columns book was created by Bridge Projects with essays by Dan Cameron (featured below) and Angela Bryant.

up a visual ambiguity that is never entirely clarified: Are these solid blocks of color that morph independently of each other or are we somehow seeing through them to the other side? Each of the ten columns within the Bridge Projects exhibition space supports one of three distinct arrangements of screens at 90- and 180-degree angles but making one’s way through the installation merely reinforces the original questions of what is a physical shape and what is a reflection. As the slow transformation of color becomes more apparent over time, what at one moment appears as a reflection can also transform, a minute later or from a different angle, into what looks like another glowing element waiting on the other side. By overlaying multiplying reflections that tend to proliferate the more one’s vision adjusts to the darkness, reflections of reflections generate still more light and color. At a certain point, it is more than likely some viewers will start to lose their sense of orientation.

In 10 Columns, Smith harnesses a means of tricking or short-circuiting our learned responses to the ways illuminated color behaves within darkened spaces to tell us where things are and how far away. Here, he employs the visual cues that typically ground us within the space we’re inhabiting to introduce the visual possibility that these glowing reflections might be receding into infinity, or that one screen pitched at a right angle to another screen might reveal the unfolding of a room inside the room, with its own receding surfaces and slowly undulating colors. The cumulative effect is akin to a promenade of two-way mirrors, with every other surface either an expansive reflection of its surroundings or a partly translucent lens.

As a result of the meticulous calibration and synchronization behind the continual segueing of one color into another, Smith’s installation subtly yet radically undermines the spatial orientation of the human body. In contrast to typical installations by Turrell or Irwin, which tend to incorporate direct or indirect natural light in order to reinforce the fullness of space, Smith employs darkness for the opposite reason. His motive isn’t to induce disorientation for its own sake but rather to enhance and magnify the capacity of an illuminated space to overwhelm the normal parameters of visual perception, flooding the brain’s receptors with messages. If this glowing

field of spatially ambiguous elements can define one’s immediate reality while standing in its midst, then perhaps the mental restraints that tether us to the ways we perceive the world outside this space also deserve a closer re-examination. We might permit ourselves to consider historic architectural connections to Smith’s project such as the Great Mosque of Córdoba, Spain, celebrated for its receding fields of slender columns with banded arches which induce a similar sense of purposefully defying the physicality of the surrounding walls and floors to induce a sense of the divine by way of an out-of-body experience that requires no preparation other than a wellhoned perceptual acuity.

Framing 10 Columns as a work of temporary architecture is nearly irresistible once we factor into the discussion Smith’s own training and professional background as an architect. And, although it might seem to be splitting hairs, the hybrid aspects of Smith’s artistic practice seem foundational to his work’s nearly physiological impact on the viewer. When we think of installation art, it is typically in terms of some spatial alteration or augmentation the artist has made to impact our perception of where it’s shown. But what Smith has done instead is develop an entirely new series of sculptures, custom-designed and fabricated for this particular space; while he’s installed those works directly on the columns, we see them, at first glance, merely as objects in space. It’s a clever and disarming tactic because the thought that we are there to look at sculptures doesn’t begin to anticipate what happens when all of the works are functioning in perfect synchronicity—at which point the work’s own internal logic has gained the upper hand.

As with all significant works of art, this grouping has been conceived in order to stay with us long after we’ve moved on to the next destination. But what may cause 10 Columns to stand apart is that, unlike nearly any other spatial or aesthetic experience, Smith’s goal is to demonstrate (in the most persuasive terms) that the most advanced technological breakthroughs of our time have not numbed our craving for experiencing the transcendental and the sublime. Something as primordial as the movement of colored lights in darkness is still the most clear-cut path to get us there.

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Before I even conceived of Lucid Stead in 2013, artist Diane Best photographed the original homesteader shack in 2005 located on my property in Joshua Tree, which I purchased that same year. I have a large print of this same photograph in my house that I acquired from Diane. It reminds me each day how far I’ve come as an artist and also underlines the importance of following through on your ideas, no matter what.

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Thank you to all of the collectors, curators, patrons, supporters, fabricators, installers, conservators, museums, galleries, art consultants, public art departments, architects, designers, engineers, and press that have been a crucial part of the progression of my career over the last ten years. Special thanks to my studio crew, family, friends, and my wife, Lisa.

Credits: Graphic Design: Mariana Pariani @girlpilot Photography: Lance Gerber Studio Page 3: Lucid Stead (detail), Steve King Page 14-15: Shack 21, Diane Best

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For all inquiries regarding commissions, sales, press or studio visits, please contact arlene@pks3.com

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Fabricated from a scrap piece of thick pressboard with a hole in it, this is the first light work that Smith made with his grandfather Fred Hamilton. He was six years old at the time (note the backward “1�). When the brass tabs are pressed down, they make contact with a screw that completes an electrical circuit. The result is different combinations of one or two light bulbs turning on, creating an interactive line of light.