Lael Corbin

Wrestling the Santa Ana Winds, 2022–25

San Diego artist Lael Corbin has chased the wind for many years, defying its intensity and potency through performative actions and sculptures. His early works involved traveling with handcrafted contraptions or what he calls “objects to wrestle the wind”—wooden wings, fabric cones, latticed frames of wire and canvas—to challenge wind currents in the desert. Corbin’s interest in physics, geology, and craft has led him to develop experiments that test the human body’s scale against natural phenomena in the vast American landscape.

For his INSITE project, the artist was commissioned to research the microhistory of the regional Santa Ana winds. The Santa Anas are a natural phenomenon formed in the Grand Basin of Nevada that reach California several times a year, fannning the region’s most destructive wildfires, and affecting the human psyche. They have been featured in literature, films, and myths, and have been compared to foehn winds, which cause mental distress due to their ionized particles. Tracing the history of Santa Anas, Corbin went beyond the scientific, and came to explore the wind as a cultural phenomenon embedded in social and philosophical questions.

The result is Wrestling the Santa Ana Winds, a short, two-channel film shot at Anza-Borrego Desert near San Diego, in which Corbin introduces an anonymous, masked character who undertakes a series of actions in the lanscape. The film draws visual inspiration from Westerns, evoking the archetype of the cowboy through performative gestures. At the same time, it critically engages with photography of the American West, where the landscape has often been presented aesthetically as a barren territory without history. As the film unfolds, the character becomes increasingly disturbed psychologically, openly taking possession of the territory through the act of stacking, which functions as a metaphor for land possession and settlement. Ultimately, the allusions reference “The Californias” landscape as a site where fiction and imagination become blurred with the reality of its history.