Cristopher
Founder of THE ELEMENTAL. Land, light, sound — and the Salton Sea.
CalArts-trained, Palm Desert raised. For more than a decade Cristopher has staged immersive, site-specific work that braids land art, light & space, and sound with the ecological story of the Coachella Valley. His Circular Dimensions series debuted at the Palm Springs Art Museum in 2016 and scaled to a five-story pavilion on the main lawn of Coachella 2022.
The Gaia Hypothesis
THE ELEMENTAL · Palm Springs
Circle of light, pool of water — a contemplative inversion of earth and sky.
“I’ve been working with the Salton Sea since high school, and I’ve seen its demise. The receding shoreline is essentially what scientists are saying could be the largest in the United States if nothing is done.”
— Cristopher Cichocki, Whitewall, 2022
Land, light, sound — and the cycle in between.
Desert Sea· 2019 · Cathedral City Festival Lawn
Salton Sea barnacles, living aloe vera, reclaimed irrigation tubing, and abandoned orchard branches — viewable by day and by ultraviolet illumination at night.
Circular Dimensions × Microscape· Coachella Music & Arts Festival, 2022
A five-story pavilion built from 25,000+ feet of PVC tubing, with live Salton Sea microscopy at its nucleus and 57.1-channel L-ISA sound.
Circular Dimensions· Audiovisual performance · debuted 2016
An ongoing series of immersive projections and live audiovisual performance. First staged at the Palm Springs Art Museum.
Light Side· Detail
A hand reaches into a constellation of light — touch as the smallest unit of an immersive environment.
Water Memory· Sculpture
Layered sediment and mineral drip — the receding shoreline of the Salton Sea read as a slow, vertical timeline.
THE
ELEMENTAL.
Founded in 2021, in partnership between Cristopher’s Epicenter Projects and Paris-based Fondation L’Accolade — Institut de France. Directed by curator Christopher Yggdre; fiscally sponsored by Fulcrum Arts.
THE ELEMENTAL programs sit at the intersection of art and environment — exhibitions, lectures, workshops, performances, printed editions, and an international artist residency program — with a focus on Earth & Land Art, BioArt, and Sound Art. It also runs New Generation Arts, a Coachella Valley high-school education track.
800 S. Vella Road, Palm Springs. On view by appointment.
Glen
Improbable Realities since 1978 — album covers, museum collections.
Born and raised in Palm Springs — son of mid-century architect Donald Wexler — trained at Humboldt State and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Glen has spent four decades making what he calls Improbable Realities— composite photographs built in-camera and in the darkroom long before Photoshop, in early digital from 1992 onward (his studio was one of the first in commercial photography to take imaging in-house), and now with AI as part of the workflow.
His covers for Van Halen’s Balance (1995), Rush’s Hold Your Fire (1987), ZZ Top’s Greatest Hits (1992), and Black Sabbath’sReunion (1998) shaped how a generation pictured those records — one of roughly 400 album covers over his career. His fine-art work lives in the permanent collections of LACMA, the George Eastman Museum, and the Palm Springs Art Museum.
Lightning Rods
Photographic composite
Scale, weather, and a quiet metallic forest — Wexler builds an impossible landscape that reads as documentary.
“These images typically combined multiple photographic elements that I would shoot separately and arrange to create an . AI is the new power tool in the toolbox.”
— Glen Wexler, The Creative Signal
Improbable photographs that read as real.
Ember Halo· Portrait
Skin as pigmented landscape, flame as crown — Wexler photographing the body as iconography.
Crossing· Photographic composite
A white horse in mid-flight over the chasm — the American west as a place of passage.
Oculus· Photographic composite
A single instrument under a column of light — small ritual inside a vast architecture.
Through· Photographic composite
A constructed window into the natural world — composition as a way of looking.
Improbable
Realities.
A single craft across four decades and three eras of tooling: analog darkroom composites in the 1970s and ’80s, in-house digital from 1992, and AI on Acid— his most recent series — shown at Bergamot Station.
~400 album covers — among them Brothers Johnson’s Blam!(his first commission, 1978), Missing Persons’ Spring Session M, Van Halen’s For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge and Balance, Rush’s Hold Your Fire, ZZ Top’s Greatest Hits, and Black Sabbath’s Reunion.
Books & monographs: The Secret Life of Cows (2007, foreword by Eric Idle; Shutterbug’s best digital-imaging book of the year), 25:25 (2005). Recent solo show The ’80s Portrait Sessions at Janssen Artspace, Palm Springs, 2024.
Honors: International Photography Awards — Photojournalism of the Year (2003); NPPA Best of Photojournalism, First Place (2004); Hollywood Reporter Key Art Award (1996, for the Batman Forever logo). Featured in the Album Cover Hall of Fame artist biographies.