Mojave Fantastique

Mojave Fantastique was created by Rachel Maxi during her time at Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency, where the Mojave landscape becomes the starting point for a densely imagined, surreal terrain. Familiar desert elements—rock formations, scrub, distant mountains, and the vast night sky—are recast through an invented vocabulary of biomorphic, architectural, and creature-like forms.

Painted in oil with 24k gold leaf, the work moves between earthy mineral tones and saturated passages of blue, rust, ochre, and green. The gold leaf introduces a concentrated luminosity within the nocturnal field, while Maxi’s layered handling of oil gives the forms weight, texture, and an almost sculptural presence. The result is a desert landscape transformed by memory, observation, and imagination into something otherworldly yet unmistakably rooted in Joshua Tree.

Oil and 24k gold leaf on canvas

Dimensions: 60 × 84 in.