Created by artist Doug Aitken, Mirage Gstaad is an installation located on the mountains of Gstaad, Switzerland.
Exhibited as part of art festival Elevation 1049, Aitken’s installation is a single storey structure that is clad with mirrors. Reflecting and blending into the surrounding environment, the installation is set to be on view until January 2021.
“Mirage Gstaad presents a continually changing encounter in which subject and object, inside and outside are in constant flux,” said Elevation 1049.
The architecture of the structure is based on ranch houses found in the American West. The interior is also clad in mirrors to create a kaleidoscope of colours and light.
“As Mirage Gstaad pulls the landscape in and reflects it back out, this classic one-story suburban house becomes a framing device, a perceptual echo-chamber endlessly bouncing between the dream of nature as pure uninhabited state and the pursuit of its conquest,” explained Elevation 1049. “Situated against the backdrop of Videmanette in Gstaad, Mirage Gstaad will bring the idea of the Manifest Destiny and the American West into contact with the European landscape and the tradition of the sublime.”
“The work really is the sum of the landscape around it. When you think of art you often think of something much more solid, but Mirage moves in an autonomous way,” said Aitken. “It changes in an almost chameleon-like form.”
“The viewer can come back to the piece as the seasons are changing, in fall in a storm or in the summer when it’s a green pasture. As our lives change the artwork is shifting with us,” added Aitken.
To learn more, click the link below.
https://www.elevation1049.org/gstaad/doug-aitken/mirage.html
