It was a tough act to follow yet Smith — born in Los Angeles and raised in the festival city of Indio, California — built a monolithic installation at the 2014 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Reflection Field, consisting of a two-story-tall mirrored rectangle and four smaller mirrored squares, reflected the movement of people in the desert environment in daylight and then drenched the night in bright progressing colors powered by LEDs.
Fascinated and inspired by the desert’s phenomenal light, Smith advances the work of California’s Light and Space pioneers of the late 1960s and ’70s, particularly James Turrell and Robert Irwin. The idea of interacting with light and the sun traces to Smith’s earliest works after studying art and architecture at Rhode Island School of Design.
