From 2,500ft in the air, the destruction from January’s Palisades fire feels vast, appearing as an enormous blight across the dry, yellowed mountainside. From 1,200ft, the catastrophe feels more intimate in scale, the size and shape of individual homes coming into focus.
“You see every detail,” says the Los Angeles-based artist Madeline Hollander, including “charred trees” and “blackened swimming pools”. These are the views from Day Flight (2025), a Frieze Projects performance Hollander choreographed in collaboration with pilots from the Santa Monica Flyers. The piece comprises a flight to Malibu’s Point Dume and back aboard a small propeller plane, during which the pilot recites Hollander’s meditations on the elements encountered along the way—the wind, the sand and the movement of the body. The viewer is momentarily given control of the wheel, an opportunity to “experience movement in three dimensions”, says Hollander, “up and down, not only left-right, back and forth”.
Conceived before the fires, the piece initially focused on these sensations of the body, but its meaning has since changed. “It’s a look at the landscape through your own eyes rather than through mediated forms,” says the artist. “It’s about the elements, it’s about the cosmos, it’s about your body, it’s about the future—and it’s about where we are in a global sense.”