At Regen Projects, Doug Aitken Reimagines Nature Through the Lens of the Anthropocene

The artist uses sculpture, film and textile hybrids to explore deep time, ecological collapse and the increasingly blurred boundaries between the natural world, technology and human intervention.

NYT (Woman in Pool at Night with Jungle), 2024; Mixed fabrics, 56 x 82 x 2 inches (142.2 x 208.3 x 5.1 cm). © Doug Aitken; courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles, 303 Gallery, New York; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Victoria Miro, London

In the lead-up to Frieze L.A., there’s one artist who’s painting the town from Hollywood to Grand Avenue. Venice-based Doug Aitken has debuted new work across three venues this season. Premiering last November was his latest film, Lightscape, starring Natasha Lyonne, which has since moved to the Marciano Art Foundation through March 15. It serves as a thematic counterpart to his new show, “Psychic Debris Field” at Regen Projects in Hollywood, a collection of wall works and sculptures exploring eco-history and contemporary habitation in Western landscapes.

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“It’s a meditation on change and how do we fit in, or are we left behind?” Aitken tells Observer on a recent morning walk through the gallery. “Are we part of this narrative, or are we building our own narrative and superimposing it on this world we live in? Is it sustainable? Are we just moving toward our own fiction?”

Upon entering the gallery, the first artwork is called Spirit Animal, a life-sized sculpture of P-22, the mountain lion that used to prowl the Hollywood Hills until he was euthanized in 2022. Aitken’s tribute is made entirely of foraged materials found in and around the city.

A close-up photograph of a large sculpted animal, resembling a feline, covered in a mix of materials including pebbles, resin, and other debris, giving it a rough, layered texture.
Spirit Animal. Jordan Riefe for Observer

“The materials carry the narrative. Freeway rubber, microplastics, food stuffs all compressed into the form of a mountain lion,” says the artist, listing ingredients. “It can be about every aspect of the artwork, not just what it symbolizes. What’s the DNA of the artwork? For this exhibition, I was interested in mining that in a deeper way and looking at a holistic view of artmaking. Creating this body of work was a journey into the physical reality around us, and not taking things for granted.”

The north gallery holds three life-sized bison, two of them planters, seemingly made of white porcelain. In reality, they’re carved from styrofoam from a recycling plant in South Central L.A. and finished with an eco-resin glaze. On the walls surrounding them are what look like acrylic landscapes but are really hand-sewn and digitally printed wall works that acted as storyboards while making Lightscape. While compositions and colors vary, each features the same mid-century modern house and pool—one with a series of teepees, another with a lone figure, another with a cloud horizon and still more that seem almost prehistoric.

A photograph of a middle-aged man with light skin, short tousled blonde hair, and a smile, wearing a black t-shirt under a blue button-up shirt, standing in a gallery with white walls and overhead lighting.
Doug Aitken’s artworks are in the permanent collections of places like the Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Georges Pompidou, the Hammer in L.A., the Hirshhorn, the Met, MoMA and the Whitney, among others. Jordan Riefe for Observer

“I was thinking about the landscape in the west and what was here before us, deep time, deep history, deep ecology. I came upon the idea of using the same composition and repeating it in a serial way but using it as a device for alteration. This represents what the exhibition is about, the sense of time, deep ecological time, mixed with what we’re creating now.”

Textiles became a part of Aitken’s practice during the COVID lockdown when he started cutting up clothing for his show, “Flags & Debris,” creating pennants bearing slogans like “Resist Algorithms,” “Digital Detox” and “Reality Fracking,” which were used in a short film featuring L.A. Dance Project.

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Originally from Redondo Beach, California, he studied at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He moved to New York in 1994, soon after graduating, and had his first solo show at 303 Gallery. He maintains a place in the city but lives and works mainly in Los Angeles. His artworks can be found in permanent collections of places like the Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Georges Pompidou, the Hammer in L.A., the Hirshhorn, the Met, MoMA and the Whitney, among others.

A photograph of an installation featuring two life-sized taxidermy deer locked in battle, with glowing, neon-like antlers, set in a dimly lit gallery space with cacti and a screen displaying desert imagery.
CONTACT (for Dagny), 2025; Site-specific installation, dimensions variable. Jordan Riefe for Observer

In Regen’s south gallery, the light is low, and the space is dominated by a pair of life-sized stags locking horns. Made from the same foam and aggregated materials as Spirit Animal, the horns glow in a variety of shades. Around them are steel cacti in tire planters, some with illuminated birds on their branches. One side of the room holds a bus stop, while the other features an ice machine-turned-cacti planter. A jumbled pile of tires balances out the composition.

“I was interested in making formal sculptures that aren’t formal. They’re physical, but they’re actually made of light and sound, as opposed to concrete and bronze. I’ve composed sound, and the light moves with the sound,” he says of the atmospheric audio track that fills the space and alters the colors of the stags’ antlers. “I was attracted to the idea of sculpture that’s different every time you encounter it.”

A close-up photograph of a glowing white bird sculpture nestled within the curved arms of a large, dark, abstract cactus-like structure in a dimly lit gallery.
Around CONTACT (for Dagny), illuminated birds perch on steel cacti situated in rubber tire planters. Jordan Riefe for Observer

The illuminated stag horns recall his 2019 storefront exhibit in Hollywood, “Don’t Forget to Breathe,” with life-sized sculptures of men and women, “modern figures,” emanating the same throbbing light, now part of the exhibit at Marciano. Like many artists, he often revisits themes, building on what came before, the way Lightspace, with images of wild animals in abandoned living spaces, glances back at his 2011 film, Black Mirror.

In the coming weeks, Aitken will return to Marciano to elaborate on Lightscape with live events and music in collaboration with Los Angeles Master Chorale, the L.A. Phil and Doug Aitken Workshop as part of a forthcoming feature film.

“To me, every artwork, every project becomes part of a wider tapestry, like a tree with more branches growing.” He points to The Mountain, a large-scale tangle of mountain lions made of foam with resin coating embedded with seeds. “Like this piece, could it go further? Could we put it, made of seeds and resin, in the landscape and, over a year, see what happens to it? Artwork is never an end. It’s part of a cycle and a bridge, so we have something we can talk about. It’s a bridge between us.”

Psychic Debris Field” is on view at Regen Projects in Hollywood through February 22.

At Regen Projects, Doug Aitken Reimagines Nature Through the Lens of the Anthropocene