Daniel Kulka is a Brooklyn based multi-discipline artist. He was out West earlier this year spending time at Joshua Tree National Park as he was awarded an artist’s residency by the United States National Park Service. Joshua Tree and its beautiful and bizarre features had a great influence on his work and inspired a project. The Edge Effect is the result of his time spent there, a photo project dedicated to reflecting on the desert’s many beauties.

The project consists of a group of photographs Kulka took of nature with large mirrors he placed on easels in the middle of the environment. The mirrors end up blending into what frames them or provide a window into an almost antithetical world. The project is so simple and so beautiful and resulted in some surreal images.

“While staying in the Park, I spent much of my time visiting the borderlands of the park and the areas where the low Sonoran desert meets the high Mojave desert,” Kulka says of his inspiration. “While hiking and driving, I caught glimpses of the border space created by the meeting of distinct ecosystems in juxtaposition, referred to as the Edge Effect in the ecological sciences. To document this unique confluence of terrains, I hiked out a large mirror and painter’s easel into the wilderness and captured opposing elements within the environment. Using a single visual plane, this series of images unifies the play of temporal phenomena, contrasts of color and texture, and natural interactions of the environment itself. ”

The Edge Effect is very easy be seduced by. You almost wish the mirrors were able to catch specific moments and permanently reflect these sunsets and cloudscapes that they are capturing. Kulka also caught these reflected moments at the right time, too. It’d be neat if he left these mirrored installations up indefinitely for hikers or passerbys to happen upon and examine in person. They are so great: it’d be such a treat to encounter them in person. Take a look at more of the work here.

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