During this month’s Milan Furniture Fair the California-based artist Phillip K Smith III, known for his light and mirror-based land artworks, is teaming up with the fashion brand Cos to create a site-specific, immersive installation called Open Sky. The horseshoe-shaped sculpture, a formidable 11.5ft high and 45ft in diameter, will be displayed in the courtyard of the 16th-century Palazzo Isimbardi, its mirror-polished steel facade reflecting the surrounding building and the sky. This is Smith’s first urban project and his first in Europe.
Cos creative director Karin Gustafsson, who launched the Milan project seven years ago, is known for offering artists creative carte blanche. “It’s about sharing a creator that we believe in, someone exciting for others to know about,” she says. “Phillip is someone we’ve been watching who always has an interesting dialogue with his surroundings.”
Those surroundings have been mostly Los Angeles and Palm Springs, where Smith was raised by his property developer father and interior designer mother. “I grew up walking through homes that were being wood-framed, so always had a sense of a structure evolving, but my mom’s work meant she honed my eye towards colour.”
Having studied architecture at Rhode Island School of Design, Smith decided it wasn’t for him. “I couldn’t do what I’m doing without my architectural education, but what I’m doing is not architecture. I’m still interested in terms of its root qualities: space, light, time and creating art at the scale of architecture.”
Smith’s installations include a mirrored light shack called Lucid Stead (above); Reflection Field, a series of mirrored and LED-lit sculptures; and The Circle of Land and Sky, a vast circle of reflective posts. “I’m a believer in your surroundings affecting your way of thinking,” Smith explains. “My current home in Palm Springs has white polished terrazzo floors, which means everything is reflected. The windows stretch down to the ground, so you see the sky, which is then reflected in the floor.”
Smith’s studio is a 10,000ft space close to his house that offers uninterrupted views of the mountains. “I’m in a place where there’s incredible light,” he says. This filters through into his work. “The drawings in my sketchbook are essentially animated paintings using light. I’ve always loved Rothko, but I want to animate the Rothko paintings.”
The Milan installation is a perfect example of this. Depending on the time of day they see it, viewers will have a completely different experience. “I’m hoping that people visiting the project in Milan will stop and spend time looking at the sky, maybe for the first time in a while. Perhaps then they’ll go home and look at the sky with fresh eyes. If that happens, then I’m happy.”
