Whether you regularly attend outdoor concerts or not, you've likely heard that Coachella, California's massive hippie-hipster gathering of art, music, and Festival Lifestyle is upon us. This weekend and next, 160,000 people will trek to Indio, California, to watch a lineup ranging from Drake to Built to Spill. Coachella founders have always touted the festival's art cred, and for 2015, they're backing up that claim with #emptycoachella, in which a select group of Instagrammers got early access to the over-the-top sculpture and installations installed on the grounds. Curbed has the first look at this year's roster of installation art, the most complex (and well-funded) exhibition for Coachella yet.
Check out the first images from Coachella's 2015 art program on Instagram at #emptycoachella, and peep our favorites below.
Twin brothers and designers Nikolai and Simon Haas studied stone carving as children, a joint aptitude that translates in 2015 to what might be the world's largest solid piece of marble: a larger-than-life Bacchus-inspired cat called "Party God." Fun facts: Simon studied painting at RISD while his brother Nikolai was a touring musician for the likes of Vincent Gallo and Sean Lennon. The Haas Brothers as we know them started in 2010 with a commission by Los Angeles architecture firm Johnston Marklee.
Los Angeles-based firm Ball-Nogues Studio returns to Coachella with Pulp Pavilion, a colorful, webbed canopy made entirely of recycled paper. Long considered disposable, paper solidifies into a tensile material when broken down and recombined into pulp. The architects fused pulp with pigment, then sprayed the mixture onto latticework of rope to create a sturdy structure that can be recycled again at the end of the festival.
Aphidoidea's contribution Chrono Chromatic comprises pillars arranged in tangent circles, painted in a spectrum of vivid color. At night, embedded RGB lights are timed to a sequence that marks the time, on every hour.
Shrine returns to Coachella with collaborator Joel Dean Stockdill for Big Horn Palace, which pays homage to Indio's original residents, the Coachella Valley's big horn sheep population. In appropriate festival fashion, it's made of found and recycled materials and generates ambient sound in the breeze.
Artists Derek Doublin and Vanessa Bonet paired up for Corporate Headquarters, a tongue-in-cheek piece that "strives to implement the critical initiatives required to achieve our vision" while delivering "operational excellence in every corner of our company." And you thought you came to Coachella to get crunk and forget your day job.
Earthmover, by Christian Ristow, combines the industriousness of man and insect with a modified crew of excavators posing as an ant. Think "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" on desert drugs.
Head to Instagram for more photos of #emptycoachella, from partying felines to giant caterpillars.
Building soon
Posted by Coachella on Monday, April 6, 2015
· #emptycoachella [Instagram]
· Coachella: the building begins [Facebook]
· The Haas Brothers [R&Company]
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