Coachella’s Flower Power

It’s summer, and time to take a breath after the roller coaster ride we’ve been on since last fall. The art world has ramped back up—new exhibitions and new galleries (Sean Kelly, David Zwirner, the second for François Ghebaly) have opened. We also had our spate of art fairs earlier this year, with Frieze LA almost doubling its size, in terms of both its gallery roster and its new venue, the Barker Hangar. The main tent (there were two) was constantly jammed, and parking was at a premium; the rumor mill buzzes they may be looking for a new location for 2024.

For this issue, I’ll focus on two things—one, an interview with artist Maggie West during the Coachella Music and Arts Festival in April, and two, a trip to New York in May. Yes, THAT festival, which I had a chance to attend for the first time. It sold out the first weekend, with some 125,000 people in attendance; I went the second weekend and found it extremely crowded. West’s was one of four new art installations commissioned this year—along with Kumkum Fernando, Vincent Leroy and Güvenç Özel—plus several holdover presentations from previous fests.

West’s “Eden” is an expansion of her regular practice in which she takes time-lapse videos of flowers and plants, following their blooms and slight movements. In post-production, she combines and manipulates the images, often erasing the background so the subjects appear to be floating in space. The details of these plant forms were projected onto larger-than-life extruded sculptures in the shape of flowers and fronds, some up to 60 feet tall. The work provided a lyrical, striking reminder of nature in the very man-made setting of a vast contemporary music festival.

“During the pandemic, I spent a lot of time gardening,” said West. “Obviously, I had a lot of free time—I was so stressed out. A lot of galleries, a lot of things went under, so for me I started gardening as a way to cope with that, and I got really into time-lapse photography.” Not surprisingly, her recent body of work reflects her fascination for flowers and plants. She added, “There’s a sense of hope and renewal when you see things grow and change and bloom.”

One also notices a lot more detail when images are enlarged, as was the case at Coachella, where people could walk up to and between the sculptural pieces. “A lot of my work involves a recontextualization of subjects by using colored lighting,” West said. “It gives you a new perspective; it makes you take a second look at it.”