The Coachella Valley Music Festival, an annual music and arts festival held in the Colorado desert, opened on April 14th, 2023. Over the two weekends, April 14–16 and April 21–23, 2023, four emerging designers and artists worldwide will leave their stamp on the famous landscape. The festival will feature art installations made by a total of nine international designers, artists, and collectives. The newly-commissioned sculptural works by Kumkum Fernando, Vincent Leroy, Güvenç Özel, and Maggie West lend color, light, and alternate perspectives to the charged atmosphere and act as fresh, colorful, and architectural beacons that transform the iconic Coachella landscape at various times of day and night.
Many returning artists will also be featured in this year's festival, along with the newly commissioned pieces. Robert Bose, infamously known as "The Balloon Guy," will return this year with Balloon Chain. For over a decade, Balloon Chain has covered the sky over Indio, becoming a recognizable feature of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Do LaB, Los Angeles-based creative firm will be at Coachella Valley Music and Art Festival with new and inventive stage designs. DKLA Designed “Mustang,” their latest contribution of DKLA Design to the Music and Art Festival. UK-based art and design studio NEWSUBSTANCE returned to the festival for the fourth year with "SPECTRA." Finally, Marnie L. Navarro is a Coachella Valley-based multidisciplinary artist re activates "Raices Cultura," a nonprofit committed to empowerment through artistic self-expression and cultural inclusivity.
Read on to discover a selection of this year's Coachella installations along with their descriptions from the artists.
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The three towering figures created by Kumkum Fernando appear at first as giant robots or action figures. But his “idols”—arranged in a row to create a colorful gathering place—pack volumes of meaning into their larger-than-life forms. The TheSriLankan artist, who lives and works in Vietnam, draws inspiration from the vivid colors of South Asian art and architecture, particularly Tibetan and Hindu temples, as well as from folk tales filled with gods and demons that resonate from his youth. Fernando began his artistic practice by collecting objects, patterns, and items containing different iconography. It has since blossomed into a bold, ongoing imagination of these found materials as contemporary art objects—impeccably composed “idols,” each paired with a poetic storytelling component written by the artist himself.
Vincent Leroy / Molecular Cloud
With Molecular Cloud, the Paris-based French artist Vincent Leroy imagines strange molecular clouds in the form of light, glossy inflatable objects floating above the vast green field of the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival. The artwork slowly, fluidly, and spectacularly changes, forming strange and organic shapes that reflect the festival's revelry. As you move closer to the massive mobiles, the reflective orbs fuse with the landscape in a hypnotic and phantasmagorical spectacle: The ground, people, and sky appear in Molecular Cloud’s mirrored surfaces, and the artwork plays with your perception and detaches you from reality.
Güvenç Özel / Holoflux
Los Angeles–based cyber physical architect and critical technologist Güvenç Özel engages the spectrum of human experience, from the physical to the virtual. From a distance, Özel’s 60-foot-tall Holoflux appears as a sculpture; as you approach, it becomes architecture: You can walk underneath and around the artwork, whose vinyl color gradient surface print plays with our perceptions of three-dimensionality. "Our realities are no longer limited to the physical world; we socialize, do business, and express ourselves more through digital media than through physical human interaction", states Özel.
Maggie West / Eden
Maggie West’s art sits at the intersection of documentation and fantasy. For Coachella, she has created one of the world’s largest 3-D photography installations, reproducing her floral photographs on 20 steel structures, each covered with wood and vinyl, ranging from 6 to 56 feet tall. To create Eden, the Los Angeles–based artist photographed various plants, each in two color schemes: warm (a combination of peach, gold, white, or pink) and cool (shades of blue, teal, indigo, and lavender). She uses lighting, not Photoshop, to color her photographs. Color is an essential component of West’s work. "I love to capture elements of the natural world within artificial environments, color is a powerful piece of our perception of the world. By photographing familiar objects with multicolored lights, my work helps viewers look closer at some of the nature they might take for granted," explains Maggie West.
