JOSHUA TREE, CA.- Joshua Treenial released project descriptions and related images for the artists participating in the 10th anniversary edition of this exhibition of site-responsive installations and performances. All of these artists are based in the desert region or have strong ties to it. From this place of learning and experience, they explore the various ways in which the desert inspires us to imagine and reimagine the future.

Curatorial Theme

This 10th anniversary edition of Joshua Treenial is titled Desert Futures: The desert serves as an ultimate site of adaptation and reinvention, where flora, fauna, and humans have evolved to thrive in an often-harsh environment. As global climatic conditions change and become more volatile, solutions developed in the desert have wider applications. Traditional cultures have crafted ways of life suited to the desert’s resource challenges, inspiring thinkers to imagine and reimagine possibilities. In contemporary society, alternative energy, space exploration, innovative artistic practices, and alternative lifestyles have all emerged from the desert landscape. Joshua Treenial 2025 explores the inspiration, complexities, and contradictions inherent in our Desert Futures.

Joshua Treenial was co-founded by KJ Baysa and Bernard Leibov and is produced by BoxoPROJECTS, an artist residency and programming initiative serving the California desert region for over a decade.

BEN ALLANOFF — GASSHO 3

The Mojave Desert is the earth undressed — geologic history is on display, felt even when not intellectually understood. Like a big sky or an ocean view, the desert makes us feel small, spatially and temporally. We see evidence of dramatic events — earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, flash floods — as well as processes like erosion and the compression of sand into stone that occur over millennia. The 20-foot-tall Gassho 3, made of steel and dried plant material, expresses two of artist Ben Allanoff’s primary unconscious obsessions: the identification and expression of that which feels fundamentally human, and the harmony of masculine and feminine energies — integral to fertility in the biological, cosmic, and creative realms.

YVONNE BUCHANAN — ANCHORS

Anchors is a GPS app that engages sight, sound, and smell through technology and the embodied experience of place. An app displays animated floating objects on visitors’ cell phones while on location at the BoxoPROJECTS. Participants discover four shapes floating in the landscape, bringing spirits, ghosts, specters of the past, into the present. Four “holding stations,” present small vessels that invite visitors to smell. Each has a pleasing scent to convey safety. When participants point their cell phones toward the coordinates, the floating objects come into view, each emitting a specific sound. Anchor develops from a series of drawings titled Out of Body about the artist’s anxiety about social upheaval. The work pays tribute to those who have suffered and persevered and connects with those currently struggling, turning the past into a foundation of strength for the future.

CARLOS RAMIREZ — XOCHIPILLI

Xochipilli explores the tension between cultural resilience and environmental degradation. By rendering the ancient Aztec deity Xochipilli — patron of art, song, and the revelry of nature — onto discarded modern “artifacts,” the artist illuminates the stark contrast between pre-colonial reverence for the natural world and contemporary cycles of excess and waste. Each artifact — an abandoned gas station sign, an antique car — serves as a relic of our time, once emblematic of progress, now hollowed by obsolescence. Xochipilli combines traditional and contemporary techniques, including hand-painted elements — an homage to Mesoamerican artistic practices. The process of adorning the artifacts mirrors the act of reclaiming lost histories. Xochipilli, traditionally associated with nature’s abundance, is depicted in a way that acknowledges both the vibrancy of life and the ghosts of our excess.

COCO HALL — YOU MAY GO NOW

Historically, people have been nomadic, moving with the seasons. You May Go Now is about our 21st century shifting. The objects in the installation are metaphors for what the artist would write if she were a poet. They include Teddy bears, receptacles of unconditional love that represent the migrations of millions of displaced people, animals, and other living creatures; ceramic and velvet remote controls; a fleet of papier mâché crafts, each representing one of five necessities of life in industrialized countries; and the iPhone Oracle, which invites viewers to ask a yes/no question, and unzip one of the stuffed iPhones for an answer.

PERRY HOBERMAN — Fault/Fold/Fragment

Fault/Fold/Fragment is a visual and aural spectacle illuminating the surrounding boulders with real-time, computer generated, stereoscopic projections. The rocks will become both the backdrop and the protagonists in a drama that evokes the deep past (such as when the entire region was underwater), the lived present (the silent grandeur of the desert), and the distant future (with or without human presence). Imagery suggesting vastly disparate scales of space (from the microscopic to the cosmic) and of time (from moments to millennia) will animate the rocks, evoking stasis as well as sudden upheavals like floods and earthquakes. The projections are accompanied by live music featuring some of the area’s most innovative musicians.

ADRIANA LOPEZ-OSPINA — RESONANCE

Resonance is a series of woven architectural structures crafted from flat reed coil and aluminum strips. The reed coil represents traditional craftsmanship and ecological resilience, and the aluminum reflects contemporary innovation and industrial adaptation. Together, they merge past and future into forms that hold the narratives of survival, reinvention, and symbiosis. Each structure features carvings etched into the aluminum strips or burned into the flat reed coil — texts and symbols derived from local histories, ecological observations, and speculative futures. The structures range in scale and encourage communal interaction. The flat reed coils create a tactile, earthy foundation, while the aluminum strips provide a reflective surface that interacts with the sunlight. By integrating the organic with the industrial, Resonance mirrors how societies have adapted and thrived in a space often considered hostile.

TYLER MORGAN — UNTITLED

Untitled begins as an adobe structure in the form of the “#” symbol, a symbol evolved from scribal shorthand into a marker of measurement, organization, and digital connectivity. Visually, it mirrors a 3x3 grid used historically in Chinese agriculture as the well-field system to structure communal labor, and in sacred architecture and mysticism as a diagram of cosmic order. Its modern use in metadata and activism speaks to collective agency and interlinked narratives.

Untitled frames a set of open questions about the relationship between form and function, symbol and site, permanence and ecological fragility. It asks: Can a modernist logic be softened or subverted through earthen form? What happens when a symbol of digital culture is rendered by hand in the climate of a future past? Why has modernist architecture in this desert region often overlooked the inherent environmental processes such as erosion, natural insulation, and resource scarcity that have long shaped indigenous building practices?

CAROLINE PARTAMIAN and DEREK MONYPENY — HARMONIC 486

George van Tassel drew inspiration from the harmonic relationships between the Integratron and the Great Pyramid at Giza, as outlined by world grid theory expert Bruce Cathie in a 1977 issue of Proceedings. Partamian has composed a graphic musical score using Cathie’s grid positioning breakdown of the Integratron which she and musician Derek Monypeny will independently interpret and perform. Their stringed instruments reference the Integratron’s original copper spiral designed to charge the cells of visitors to the building. The title refers to the “harmonics of time” in Cathie’s essay.

RANDY POLUMBO — MIRAGE

Cities are burning. Vital resources are drying up, diminishing, and misallocated. From epigenetic to morphic resonance, to plain old “monkey see, monkey do,” the bill must be paid, or if passed on, the invoice plus interest to future generations. Mirage is a man-made pond and fountain with wheels turning from the power of dripping water, bubbles aerating water, and mist created through solar energy. A canopy of solar panel “leaves and branches” powers a complex light show where colors shift, brightness weaves, and things are not what they seem. This techno- organic oasis offers refuge, an opportunity to connect with the earth and its denizens and be blessed with water pulled from the ground by the sun, and reinserted after gently misting you.

Glass flowers erupt on jagged futuristic vines and traffic lights signal in uncustomary ways while spinning reflectors, oscillating dim circuits, and multichannel choral blends of color wash over the inside and outside of the silvered lights.

ETHAN PRIMASON — Z1, Z2, Z3

This sculptural triptych features three bodies, allegorical and abstract, all carved from the same column of basalt. While sculpting stone, the artist confronts the material through a conceptual framework of direct carving, a meditative and intuitive process of labor that follows no drawing or blueprint, only a reaction to the inherent qualities and properties of the material. Columnar basalt is a very hard and abundant stone. Formed by the rapid cooling of lava, it accounts for the first land masses on earth and embodies a cycle of structural change, transformation, destruction and creation.

DORENE QUINN — CHOLLA SKELETON REGENERATION

This installation of altered cholla skeletons represent the artist working to collaborate with nature as an act of preservation and protection. The “skeletons” were gathered from around the artist’s property in Morongo Valley and are symbolically regenerated using wire cloth and cotton and recycled paper fiber to reinforce and extend the forms. These additions strengthen and protect the unique branch structures, projecting the artist's reverence and delight in the remarkable forms that nature generates in our desert.

HEIDI SCHWEGLER — FAMILIAR

There's something empowering about understanding how the body can be strengthened, repaired, and transformed — that we possess the ability to pursue therapy to alter our minds, and consciously choose to adapt. In this project, the artist has sculpted her “familiar” — a spiritual alter ego closely tied to the self, often manifesting as an animal. She blends her form with the spirits of the desert: the coyote, mountain lion, and roadrunner, intertwined with the resilient cholla and found desert detritus. Set within a wall of boulders, this piece explores the intricate relationship between humans and the Mojave Desert. Using sculptural techniques and digital tools, the work highlights the drive for survival amid climate change, echoing each creature's (and plant’s) struggle to just not die.

NICOLA VRUWINK — RE-FUSE(D)

This series of totemic forms, created by hand using traditional craft and construction techniques, explores the interplay and the tensions between environmental preservation and human intervention. Built from materials sourced from the environment and remnants from the artist’s practice, the geometric forms address sustainability, adaptation, resilience, and the complex relationship between humans and the desert landscape. They emphasize cycles of creation and destruction, serving as both a metaphor for transformation and a commentary on the physical and psychological sustainability of artistic practices.