BOOK: Doug Aitken-Mirage, Zolo Press

Dedicated to Doug Aitken’s three iterations of the “Mirage” installation in Palm Springs, Detroit, and Gstaad (2017–2021), this publication offers the reader an experiential book that shares some of the characteristics of “Mirage” the immersive emotion, the disrupted perception, the merging of the viewer and the landscape. A site-specific installation successively exhibited in the California desert outside Palm Springs, a defunct Detroit bank, and the Alpine landscape of Gstaad, Mirage is inspired by the ranch-style suburban American house, informed by the ideas of architect Frank Lloyd Wright and entirely composed of reflective mirrored surfaces. A visual echo-chamber, its mirrored surfaces form a life-size kaleidoscope that absorbs and reflects the landscape. Subject and object, interior and exterior, the tangible and the ephemeral, the psychological and the physical, built architecture and landscape : each of these oppositional forces are held in constant tension, yet allowed to shift and transform during the passing of time and seasons. Like a human-sized lens, Mirage works to frame and distort the evolving world outside of it. There is no single time to view this work, as each moment provides a new variation: 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 is unique. “I’m interested in the viewer seeing themselves in the work,” Aitken says about his installation, which also dialogues with the history of the Land art. This book gathers together never-before-published photo-documentation on the three “Mirage” installations, drawings, and other material related to the project, a comprehensive text by Neville Wakefield, as well as an interview with the artist on the history and evolution of “Mirage” over the years and in its different locations. Featuring cold foils, special inks, silver printing, and bound as a leporello to reflect on the mirror-like quality of “Mirage”, this publication is a limited edition that  is a collectible volume for both art amateurs and book lovers.-Efi Michalarou