Full-scale neoclassical and baroque buildings made of wire mesh loom over festival-goers at Coachella this week, representing artist Eduardo Tresoldi‘s largest works yet. The Italian sculptor is known for his eerie installations of translucent architecture, previously seen in a stunning indoor installation in Abu Dhabi, a ghostly ship sailing across Italy’s Bay of Sapri and the resurrection of a long-fallen church in Puglia. Entitled ‘Etherea,’ the new sculptures are a reflection on humankind’s relationship with our built environments.

“The installation plays ironically on the dualism between the pure and the filtered experiences that intertwine with one another, to eventually leave the man at the center of it all,” says Tresoldi. “With the passage from a macro-reality to a restricted one, the human body becomes a key to read, discover, measure and experience reality, just like architecture itself. An analogy between man, architecture and their surroundings is ultimately established.”

The three structures that make up ‘Etherea’ at the Coachella Music Festival stand at 36, 54 and 72 feet in height, taking Tresoldi’s sculpture to a whole new scale. They make a striking contrast with the palm trees, mountains and spectacular sunsets in Indio, California, where Coachella is set. Shots that include the crowds really reinforce just how big these creations are.

As always, the layers of mesh create a haunting sense of unreality, keeping the scenery and sky visible beyond each of the ‘buildings’ so they feel more like memories or projections than physical structures.

Photos by Roberto Conte

A ghostly ship sails through the Bay of Sapri in Southern Italy, just translucent enough for onlookers to doubt whether they’re imagining it, its silhouette obscured by a jumble of rectilinear columns. The latest wire mesh masterwork by artist Edoardo Tresoldi, ‘Locus’ is a collaboration with Italian musician IOSONOUNCANE, bringing sculpture and music together in a public performance enjoyed by a crowd gathered on the nearby shore.

The musician debuted his unreleased composition during the installation, presented as part of Sapri’s Derive Festival, an experimental art, music and poetry project curated by Antonio Oriente. The combination of the ship’s visuals, the lighting, the music and the setting truly made it a one-of-a-kind experience, with the sounds amplified by the water.

“Sapri Bay become sone of the characterizing elements of the event, acquiring a temporal and performative dimension,” states the Derive website (translated from Italian. “Collaboration blends different contemporary languages, redefining the relationship between audience and artist in a kind of hic et nunc [here and now] unrepeatable.”

Edoardo Tresoldi is known for his eerily beautiful wire compositions, which are typically architectural in nature, recreating entire classical and historic structures like echoes of churches that fell into ruins centuries ago and palatial interior installations augmented by flying birds.

This ongoing series of sculptural floating cities and suspended towns could be mistaken for pencil drawings when glanced on a wall or seen in a two-dimensional medium like photography.

Spanish artist David Moreno sees it that was as well: at attempt to draw sculptures, but using steel rods lashed together with piano wire rather than a pen on a pad. Background depth, shadows and other slight dimensional clues cue viewers into what they are really seeing.

These stick-figure structures correspondingly look deceptively simple: what would normally be a single stroke is instead a meticulous assembly process, the rods tied together by hand and piano wire wrapped and clipped to support them.

The Barcelona-based artist has also toyed with 3D-printing extrusion devices to shape similar works in more colorful formats, combining, for instance, a series of stylized chairs into a mass of interconnected hanging sculptures.

In other cases, strings and wires are looped and stretched to form complex shapes or interact with other objects – stories and figures emerging from a combination of materials and forms.

While the specifics of his work shifts from one installation to the next, a common theme is clear: taking traditions of line art into the third dimension and seeing what can come of the process (via Colossal).

There are many theories, but no one is quite sure where the practice of throwing shoes over raised urban infrastructure started. Some suggest bullies take shoes from other kids and toss them over power and telephone lines; other think it could be a way of marking gang or drug-dealing territories. Or perhaps people just make and lose bad bets, paying the price with sore feet.

Whatever the reason, London street artist Pejac (images by Gary Van Handley) has taken the shoe-on-a-wire concept to the next level, with individual and paired shoes seeming to hang upside-down, pulled inexplicably toward the sky. Presumably to minimize annoyance to the city (and possible damage to critical lines), the artist in this case opted to use poles rather than wires for support.

Titled Downside Up, this series of shoe art installations across East London are in part a series of street artworks but also a viral marketing campaign for an upcoming solo exhibit. Pejac is well known for both silly and thought-provoking interventions, often manipulating built environments in subtle ways by pealing paint or through small installations easily missed by less observant passersby.

Scribbled sketches seem to leap off the page and hover in mid-air, filling out in three dimensions, in this impressive series of sculptures made from bent wire. Artist David Oliveira captures the essence of his subjects, whether they’re people or mountain lions, by studying their anatomy and translating their sense of vitality and movement into minimalist life-sized forms.

Oliveira sees his works as existing on some other plane, like an abstracted echo of the physical bodies that exist in our reality. Twisting, looping and curving black wires, he sketches in air, and the resulting sculptures look as if they’ve been peeled off a piece of paper, enlarged and skewed like skeletons that were hidden inside each subject all along.

As viewers, we look at these gestural impressions of living creatures and our minds fill in the blanks, suggesting to us what the real-life subjects must have looked like, how they must have moved. The sculptures are particularly effective when they’re hung from the ceiling in transparent thread, seeming to float.