Trekking into the desert outside of Las Vegas is an arduous activity, as summer temperatures can climb well past 100 degrees. But the unforgiving landscape has also long been a surprisingly popular home for public art. Michael Heizer and Jean Tinguely crafted iconic works of "land art" there in the 1960s, and, down in the Ivanpah Valley, the celebrated Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone has now constructed his latest public art installation, Seven Magic Mountains, which was unveiled yesterday and will be on display through May 2018. The large-scale work, located just outside the small town of Jean, Nevada (about ten miles south of Las Vegas), is composed of seven totem-like towers of locally sourced limestone boulders, with each individual block spray-painted an intensely vibrant, Day-Glo shade.

Seven Magic Mountains, in Nevada's Ivanpah Valley Courtesy of Art Production Fund and Nevada Museum of Art.

It can be a jarring contrast between the Skittles-colored labyrinth and the mesquite bushes and dead Joshua trees. But that’s kind of the point. Stretching 35 feet into the sky at its apex, the $3.5 million project, produced in tandem by the New York-based Art Production Fund and the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, seeks to, according to the artist, evoke that spot “mid-way between the natural and the artificial.” A short walk from Interstate 15, the busy thoroughfare connecting Los Angeles and Las Vegas, the piece is surrounded by the raw environment but within earshot of cars whistling down the highway.

Looking through Rondinone's sculpture towards the mountains. Courtesy of Art Production Fund and Nevada Museum of Art

This isn’t the first time Rondinone has played with these kinds of urban/nature contrasts. His most recent public installation, the aptly-titled Human Nature, placed nine colossal bluestone cave art-esque figures in the middle of New York City's Rockefeller Plaza in 2013. Out in Nevada, however, Rondinone’s was less focused on transposing our human heritage with our 21st-century lives and more interested in the fundamental aspects of our nature. "Everyone can relate to balancing stones. Every child has tried to do this with a pile of rocks," he told Women's Wear Daily on Monday. And by injecting fluorescent shades into these rocks, he has placed a contemporary spin on the form, making a work that’s worth the haul. "Past land art was camouflaged with its surroundings, but because my project’s bright colors pop in the desert, it merges the histories of land art and Pop Art," Rondinone told Pret-a-Reporter. "Most people don’t know how beautiful the land is around Las Vegas, so I hope this inspires them to explore the city’s nature."

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