Dancing With The Sky

Name: Dancing With The Sky
Start: 2025-02-22T15:00:00-08:00
End: 2025-02-22T17:00:00-08:00
Location: 62732 Sullivan Rd, Joshua Tree, CA, United States, California 92252

Schedule

Sat Feb 22 2025 at 03:00 pm to 05:00 pm

UTC-08:00

Location

62732 Sullivan Rd, Joshua Tree, CA, United States, California 92252 | Joshua Tree, CA

Séverin Guelpa
Dancing With The Sky
Sculpture Unveiling and Artist Discussion
Saturday February 22, 2025, 3pm
BoxoPROJECTS 62732 Sullivan Road, Joshua Tree, CA 92252
Following his long-term installation, Supermarket, for Joshua Treenial 2019, Séverin Guelpa has returned to BoxoPROJECTS to create a new permanent installation Dancing With The Sky. Created from a large local boulder split into several pieces, the sculpture stands in the Joshua Tree landscape in dialog with the natural elements: sky, weather conditions, cycles of light. The stones' reflective facets communicate the rhythms of the desert itself and the eternal geology of the Hi Desert.
Please join us for a discussion regarding Séverin's projects and his long relationship with the region to be followed by a celebration of the new sculpture.
Artist Bio
Séverin Guelpa is a visual contemporary artist. He lives and works in Geneva (b. 1974).
Rooted in the territories he explores, Séverin Guelpa’s work addresses questions of time, autonomy, land use or emancipation. His installations, sculptures, videos and prints combine raw materials, construction elements and industrial scraps, which he assembles, weighs and tensions to speak of our relationship with our social or natural environment. He generally draws his inspiration and work from threatened sites, most often in desert regions, looking to the fragility of these places and the singularity of the communities who live there for the main thrust of his work.
With his MATZA projects, Séverin Guelpa invests in parallel across the world extreme territories or emblematic urban areas in which he mobilizes around projects other artists, craftsmen, architects or experts from different fields of expertise. Learning from these regions feeds into work on our ability to adapt and envision new forms of ecologies and collective reciprocities. After projects in the Mojave Desert (2014–2017), the Aletsch Glacier (2016–2018), the Kerkennah Islands in Tunisia (2017) and several Swiss cities, MATZA has recently expanded to Colombia (Medellín and Cúcuta) and Kenya (Nairobi) between 2022 and 2023. Currently, Guelpa is working across the Mojave Desert (California), the Swiss Alps, and the Salar de Atacama (Chile). In 2024, he launched the MATZA Studio, which now operates as a tool for experimental and occasional production.
After a degree in Political Science, Séverin Guelpa obtained a master’s degree in visual arts at HEAD, Geneva. He has given workshops and lectures about his work at numerous institutions, universities and art schools in Switzerland as internationally.