In October 2013, Californian artist Phillip K. Smith III took a weathered homesteader’s shack in the high desert at Joshua Tree and turned it into Lucid Stead. He replaced every other horizontal board with a strip of mirror, so that the walls seem to vanish into the desert scrub around them, and wired the building with light that glows in shifting colour after sunset.

Lucid Stead’s alternating wood and mirrored bands in the Joshua Tree desert
Lucid Stead, Phillip K. Smith III’s 2013 installation in Joshua Tree, California. Photo: lucidstead.com / Royale Projects.

The shack was about 70 years old when Smith found it. He kept its timber frame as the armature of the piece and built the rest from glass and acrylic mirror, plywood, LED and fluorescent lighting, custom electronics and a solar array. The finished structure measures roughly 4.3 by 6.2 metres and stands 2.9 metres tall.

How Lucid Stead works: mirrors and light

By day the mirrored strips reflect and refract the surrounding terrain. Each band of glass picks up the sand, creosote and sky beside the cabin, so stripes of landscape seem to run straight through the walls while the remaining wooden boards, roof line and corners hold the outline together. Move a few steps and the reflected view changes with you.

At sunset the work changes character. Geometric fields of colour, run by a colour program and Arduino-controlled electronics, emerge from the structure and appear to hover in the darkness. Smith described the piece as being about tapping into the quiet and the pace of change of the desert: the cabin stays put while the light, and the landscape reflected in it, keeps moving.

Reflected landscape across the corner of Phillip K. Smith III’s installation
Every other board of the old shack was replaced with horizontal mirror. Photo: lucidstead.com / Royale Projects.

The 2013 unveiling in Joshua Tree

Lucid Stead was revealed on a weekend in October 2013 and was planned as a two-day event. Word spread fast: more than 400 people came over two weekends, some travelling from New York and Canada. The film below, released with the project, shows the cabin through a full cycle from bright daylight to its glowing night-time state.

The installation was temporary. The artist later published a series of prints based on it, From Lucid Stead, so the work lives on in photographs, film and print.

Mirrored strips of Lucid Stead reflecting the surrounding desert
The mirrored bands reflect the desert scrub around the cabin. Photo: lucidstead.com / Royale Projects.
Lucid Stead cabin appearing partly invisible against the desert
From some angles the walls seem to dissolve into the landscape. Photo: lucidstead.com / Royale Projects.
Mirrored panels on Phillip K. Smith III’s Lucid Stead desert installation
Mirror, plywood and the original timber frame of the 70-year-old homestead shack. Photo: lucidstead.com / Royale Projects.

Phillip K. Smith III: light and reflection in the desert

Smith was born in Los Angeles in 1972, grew up in the Coachella Valley and works from a studio in Palm Desert. He trained at the Rhode Island School of Design, earning degrees in both fine arts and architecture, and his work sits at the scale of buildings. Lucid Stead set the pattern for the large reflective and light-based pieces that followed:

  • Portals (2016): an 85-foot open-air pavilion at the Coachella festival, built around a mesquite tree and ringed by eight LED-lit circular portals.
  • The Circle of Land and Sky (2017): 300 polished stainless-steel reflectors, each tilted at 10 degrees, set in a circle on the desert floor for the first Desert X exhibition.
  • Open Sky (2018): a mirrored installation in the courtyard of Palazzo Isimbardi in Milan during Salone del Mobile, in collaboration with COS.

To see his current work, follow the exhibitions listed on the artist’s website. Desert X returns to the Coachella Valley regularly, and its site lists past and present installations.

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