From 2,500ft within the air, the destruction from January’s Palisades hearth feels huge, showing as an unlimited blight throughout the dry, yellowed mountainside. From 1,200ft, the disaster feels extra intimate in scale, the dimensions and form of particular person houses coming into focus.
“You see each element,” says the Los Angeles-based artist Madeline Hollander, together with “charred timber” 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 airplane, 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, backwards and forwards”.
Conceived earlier than the fires, the piece initially targeted on these sensations of the physique, however its that means has since modified. “It’s a have a look at the panorama by way of your personal eyes relatively than by way of mediated types,” says the artist. “It’s concerning the components, it’s concerning the cosmos, it’s about your physique, it’s concerning the future—and it’s about the place we’re in a worldwide sense.”
