Pilar Zeta’s installation, “The Observer Effect,” arrived during Miami Art Week as another entry into the city’s long tradition of temporary monuments. This year’s version is a corridor of metallic columns and arches that reads like a temple and a mirage at once, finished in an iridescent skin of car paint that shifts with the light.
Pilar has said she likes “ancient Greek and Egyptian” forms mixed with modernism. Here those references are on full display through her “walk-through portal,” part sculpture and part stage. It was installed with some difficulty—when it arrived from China several of the pieces did not fit—behind the reopened Shelborne hotel.
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- “The Observer Effect” is a monumental sculptural installation of light and perception. Photo by Chris Force
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- Iridescent and immersive, the work invites you through portals that fuse self, nature, and architectural space, shifting in color and light to bridge the tangible, the immaterial, and the quantum. Photo by Chris Force
Musician Laraaji activated the work at sunrise and sunset with an improvised meditation, describing his playing as a kind of tone poem, while listeners sprawled out on the sand on top of blankets.
In a Sixtysix interview earlier this year, Pilar described a marble table she made as “a portal,” meant to “create a portal of creativity.” The Miami Beach installation scales that impulse up, from furniture to public architecture.
Next she heads to Paris, where a follow-up work is slated for the Place du Louvre.
