Gary Simmons

Based on his series Erasure Drawings, Gary Simmons created his INSITE97 project Desert Blizzard, a film documenting snowflake shapes drawn in the sky by a pilot/skywriter in Anza-Borrego Desert. The film was projected onto a fabricated train departures sign in the Santa Fe Depot baggage room in downtown San Diego. The site was chosen for its reference to romance and loss, and travel through physical and mental space. Simmons was interested in the site-specificity of the sky drawings as well as the ghostly, ephemeral quality of the images that placed them in a liminal space between representation and abstraction. Viewers had to remember what the original images looked like before the smoke dissipated, transforming Simmons’s public art piece into a private one, based on each individual’s memory.

The inclusion of Desert Blizzard in the exhibition Erratic Fields, almost thirty years since it was created, introduces a critical layer to understanding the atmosphere not only as a natural phenomenon, but also—as the artist has stated—as “a site that exceeds our definitions of public and private space.” In this work, the sky functions as a mental and symbolic field, aligned with the artist’s stated interest in “figuring absence and the invisibility of the dimension of human history.” Skywriting—a language that materializes only to disappear—becomes a structural element through which histories are written, erased, and continually reimagined.