From 2,500ft within the air, the destruction from January’s Palisades hearth feels huge, showing as an infinite blight throughout the dry, yellowed mountainside. From 1,200ft, the disaster feels extra intimate in scale, the scale and form of particular person properties coming into focus.
“You see each element,” says the Los Angeles-based artist Madeline Hollander, together with “charred bushes” and “blackened swimming swimming pools”. These are the views from Day Flight (2025), a Frieze Tasks efficiency Hollander choreographed in collaboration with pilots from the Santa Monica Flyers. The piece contains a flight to Malibu’s Level Dume and again aboard a small propeller aircraft, throughout which the pilot recites Hollander’s meditations on the weather encountered alongside the way in which—the wind, the sand and the motion of the physique. The viewer is momentarily given management of the wheel, a chance to “expertise motion in three dimensions”, says Hollander, “up and down, not solely left-right, forwards and backwards”.
Conceived earlier than the fires, the piece initially targeted on these sensations of the physique, however its which means has since modified. “It’s a have a look at the panorama by means of your individual eyes relatively than by means of mediated varieties,” says the artist. “It’s in regards to the parts, it’s in regards to the cosmos, it’s about your physique, it’s in regards to the future—and it’s about the place we’re in a world sense.”
