"The Far Away"

Filmmaker Todd Ballantyne of ACB Films collaborated with the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum for a wonderful exploration of the landscapes of northern New Mexico that inspired this legendary artist. It is breathtakingly beautiful.

https://acbfilms.com/
https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/

BEAUTY: Painting--Stephen Magsig

In these waning days of summer, let's look at the gorgeous southwestern United States landscapes of artist Stephen Magsig (I featured his refracted city lights paintings previously here). The locations are lovely but his interpretation makes them even more so...these areas in and around Taos Pueblo, New Mexico are peaceful and he captures the stillness and magnificence of the vistas beautifully.

And I love these very special views--day light, dusk, and night--of the famous San Francisco de Asís Mission Church in Ranchos de Taos.

Top to bottom: Deep Shadows; Evening Shadows; Evening view; Lights Across the Valley; Mesa Shadows; Midday Shadows; Passing Storm; Pueblo Shadows; Ranchos de Taos; Red Willow Creek, Taos Pueblo; Rio Grande Gorge; Silence, The Turquoise Door; Vermillion Cliffs; three views of Ranchos de Taos Church

http://www.smagsig.com/western-landscapes.html

BEAUTY: Clothing--Qasimi

For London Fashion Week Men's, Khalid Al Qasimi showed a Spring-Summer '19 collection for his eponymous label that is all about travel and summer. He took us to the Middle East with tea-stained khakis, North African prints, and the glorious sand-and-sunset colors of the desert. There are a lot of wonderful, breezy, baggy pieces here to wear on holiday (Qasimi says his collections contain “a broad range of wardrobe staples for the constant traveler”) or in an actual desert!

https://www.qasimi.com/

Products Of Tomorrow

The Nature Conservancy has designed what they are calling "Products Of Tomorrow."

Based on our current trajectory and climate change, land and drinkable water will be scarce, producing droughts and famines. Couple this with political and social calamities stemming from what is happening now. This is the likely outcome.

It doesn't have to be like this. Visit The Nature Conservancy website for more info.

https://www.nature.org/

BEAUTY: Installation--Jennifer Bolande

Here is one more conceptual installation at the current Desert X, an outdoor art exhibition through April 30, 2017. Artist Jennifer Bolande used the idea of advertising billboards--particularly the classic idea of the Burma shave ad, which is successive ads placed one after the other, fragments of an advertisement but which when seen consecutively, create a complete concept--to highlight not a product but the thing that the billboard obscures. The landscape. When lined up just right, each billboard acts almost as a window...

http://jbolande.com/

BEAUTY: Installation--Doug Aitken

Multi-media artist Doug Aitken's newest installation is Mirage, a ranch house covered in mirrored panels perched at foot of the San Jacinto mountains at the Coachella Valley in California. The installation is part of Desert X, an outdoor art exhibition comprised of pieces by over 15 artists. While the festival ends April 30, 2017, Aitken's Mirage will remain in situ through October 31, 2017.

Aitken's artist statement:

MIRAGE is a site-specific installation set in the Southern California desert. Utilizing the form of a ranch-style suburban American house, the sculpture is composed of reflective mirrored surfaces. MIRAGE distills the recognizable and repetitious suburban home into the essence of its lines, reflecting and disappearing into the vast western landscape. Opening February 25, 2017 as 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 through October 31, 2017.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

MIRAGE is reconfigured as an architectural idea: the seemingly generic suburban home now devoid of a narrative, its inhabitants, their possessions. This minimal structure now functions entirely in response to the landscape around it. The doors, windows, and openings have been removed to create a fluid relationship with the surrounding environment.

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. 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. Its mirrored surfaces form a life-size kaleidoscope that absorbs and reflects the landscape. 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.

Like a human-scale lens, MIRAGE works to frame and distort the evolving world outside of it. 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. There is no fixed perspective or correct interpretation. Each experience of this living artwork will be unique.

Photos by Lance Gerber
https://www.dougaitkenmirage.com/
https://www.desertx.org/

BEAUTY: Photography--Troy Paiva

Troy Paiva began shooting light-painted night photography in 1989 and creates moody, atmospheric images of the ghost towns, abandoned sites, dilapidated buildings, and empty vistas of rural California. Of his work, Paiva says, "The outdoor work was shot on or near the full moon, which is the main light-source in most of these images. Many of the interiors were shot in total darkness, relying only on added light to create the image...All my lighting is hand-held and is added one source at a time during the minutes-long exposures. I frequently light the entire scene with a single light source used from several angles. I also use snoots and gobos to manipulate the way the light falls. This simple lighting methodology allows me to travel light and work fast in difficult locations." I love how he uses unsettling red and green light to add an otherworldly sense to his shots.

Check out all of his work on his site "Lost America."
http://lostamerica.com/

And if you want to learn how to shoot photos like these, check out his tutorial book "Light Painted Night Photography."
http://www.flatbooks.com/light-painted-night-photography/