Art Under The Desert Sun
Coachella Valley, California
Desert X 2025

Edge of Humanity Magazine

1 year ago

Photographer Jeremiah Gilbert is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this documentary photography. From the project ‘Desert X 2025’. To see Jeremiah’s body of work, click on any photograph.

The biennial Desert X has returned to California’s Coachella Valley for its 2025 edition. The artists featured this year offer fresh perspectives on a world increasingly shaped by human presence. For many, this manifests as an exploration of time within spaces where ancestral wisdom converges—and sometimes clashes—with contemporary visions of our shared future. As the most tangible marker of human transformation, architecture serves as the foundation for numerous projects, ranging from pavilion-like structures to more understated forms.

I was able to view six of the installations during a recent visit. First up, Sarah Meyohas’s poetic and immersive installation, Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams, which explores “caustics”—light patterns created by the refraction or reflection of light through curved surfaces. Evoking ancient timekeeping devices like sundials and paying tribute to 20th-century land art, the installation transforms a naturally occurring optical effect, often seen at the bottom of a swimming pool, into an interactive experience. Using advanced light-shaping technology, visitors can direct sunlight onto a flowing, ribbon-like structure that weaves across the desert floor.

The Living Pyramid is a monumental sculpture and environmental intervention by pioneering artist and philosopher Agnes Denes. This marks the first desert iteration of Denes’s iconic pyramid structure, planted with vegetation native to the region. As the exhibition unfolds, the pyramid evolves, shaped by the desert landscape’s slow and deliberate growth cycles. By breathing life into one of civilization’s most enduring forms, The Living Pyramid serves as a poignant reminder that within care and nurture lies the essence of our resilience.

Ronald Rael’s Adobe Oasis reimagines and revitalizes traditional yet overlooked earthen building techniques by merging them with contemporary technologies. Constructed through an innovative 3D-printing process that uses robotic programming to shape structures entirely from mud, Rael’s corrugated earthen ribbons echo the textured trunks of palm trees. Inspired by the enduring presence of Coachella Valley’s palm oases, the installation creates passageways that frame the land and sky, inviting moments of solitude and connection while embodying the cyclical rhythms of geologic time.

Sanford Biggers’s Unsui (Mirror) presents two towering sequin sculptures set against the vast desert sky. Clouds, a recurring motif in Biggers’s work, represent freedom, boundlessness, and interconnectedness. Rooted in the artist’s study of Buddhism, the title references unsui, a Japanese term meaning “clouds and water,” symbolizing fluidity and movement without constraint. Their presence in the arid landscape—where clear skies dominate—becomes a poignant gesture of hope, offering the promise of much-needed water in an environment shaped by its absence.

In Soul Service Station, Alison Saar continues her alchemical exploration of salvage as a material practice and a metaphor for transformation. Saar reimagines the roadside gas stations that have long dotted the American West, including the Coachella Valley. Yet, rather than offering fuel for vehicles, her station nourishes the soul. Blending community-crafted elements with furnishings made from salvaged materials, the installation becomes a sanctuary for travelers—a space to pause, reflect, and gather strength, carrying forward the histories, voices, and aspirations that shape our collective journey.

Lastly, José Dávila’s The act of being together features massive, monolithic marble blocks that seem to fracture time and space. Dávila transported these stone blocks from a quarry just beyond the U.S.-Mexico border to the Coachella Valley, forging a connection between the two places by emphasizing the void they left behind and their striking presence in an unfamiliar landscape. Their journey is physical and symbolic—crossing national boundaries while navigating the liminal space between the seen and the unseen.

Desert X’s 2025 edition will be on display through May 11.

Jeremiah Gilbert is an award-winning photographer and travel writer. His travels have taken him to over a hundred countries and all seven continents, while his photography has been published internationally and exhibited worldwide. He is the author of four travel books, including Can’t Get Here from There: Fifty Tales of Travel, From Tibet to Egypt: Early Travels After a Late Start, and On to Plan C: A Return to Travel, which documented his return to travel post-COVID and was the first to include his photography. His most recent, Around the World in Eighty Photos, is out now.

All images and text © Jeremiah Gilbert