Desert x mirage house
Visitors are encouraged to dive into the artwork, whether jumping on the artificial puddles of Manal AlDowayan’s Now You See Me, Now You Don’t or connecting with one another on One Two Three Swing! by the Danish collective Superflex. There is no fixed perspective or correct interpretation. Each experience of this living artwork will be unique.It's a historic moment for contemporary art in Saudi Arabia, with a roster of young artists-many of whom are women-using the desert as their canvas. There is no single time to view this work, as each variation provides something new: at night the distant lights refract to create a universe of stars on a tranquil afternoon the sky is transformed into banks of blue fragmented by slices of clouds. Like a human-scale lens, MIRAGE works to frame and distort the evolving world outside of it.
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Subject and object, interior and exterior, the psychological and physical each of these oppositional forces are held in constant tension, yet allowed to shift and transform in the ever-changing desertscape. Its mirrored surfaces form a life-size kaleidoscope that absorbs and reflects the landscape. As MIRAGE pulls the landscape in and reflects it back out, its familiar architectural form becomes a framing device, a visual echo-chamber endlessly reflecting both the dream of nature as a pure uninhabited state and the pursuit of its conquest. Situated at the juncture where the rugged San Jacinto mountain range gives way to the Coachella valley, MIRAGE is perched over a distant modern development that fades into the open desert. The doors, windows, and openings have been removed to create a fluid relationship with the surrounding environment. This minimal structure now functions entirely in response to the landscape around it. MIRAGE is reconfigured as an architectural idea: the seemingly generic suburban home now devoid of a narrative, its inhabitants, their possessions. The mass-produced ranch home became a familiar sight across the country, the style filling the American landscape as quickly as each new subdivision was built. After World War II, the ranch style’s streamlined simplicity gained popularity as commercial builders employed a simplified assembly line approach to create this efficient form, matching the rapid growth of the suburbs. In the 1920s and ‘30s a small inspired group of architects working in California and the West created the first suburban ranch style houses, fusing Wright’s fluid treatment of spaces with the simple one-story homes built by ranchers. The California Ranch Style, which is unique to the West, was informed by the ideas of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who believed that architecture should be both in and of the landscape. Movement was the driving force behind the settling of the American West, and the long flat vistas that stretched toward the Pacific shaped the ideology behind this iconic embodiment of American architecture. Opening Februas a part of Desert X, a site-specific contemporary art exhibition curated by Artistic Director Neville Wakefield, Mirage will remain on view after the exhibition closes.
![desert x mirage house desert x mirage house](https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2017/02/unspecified-3-2-1024x585.jpeg)
MIRAGE distills the recognizable and repetitious suburban home into the essence of its lines, reflecting and disappearing into the vast western landscape. Utilizing the form of a ranch-style suburban American house, the sculpture is composed of reflective mirrored surfaces. MIRAGE is a site-specific installation set in the Southern California desert.