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In this video, we visit Alex Prager’s “Mirage Factory,” which the artist created in Miami Beach during Miami Art Week 2025. Alex Prager’s Mirage Factory, presented by Capital One and The Cultivist during Miami Art Week 2025 (December 3–5), transformed Miami Beach’s historic 1940 Beach Theatre on Lincoln Road into a large-scale, walk-through cinematic illusion. Visitors stepped inside three hyper-detailed miniature sets that trace Los Angeles from its pre-development orange-grove myth through Hollywood’s neon promise to a surreal Griffith Park fantasy, complete with a submerged ruby-slipper nod to The Wizard of Oz. Crafted with the same model-makers who collaborate with Wes Anderson, the installation turned viewers into giants within Prager’s signature world of glamorous unease and manufactured dreams. Free and open to the public December 4–5, it also hosted exclusive events, including a Diana Ross performance and a W Magazine party. A portion of gift-shop proceeds benefited Heal the Bay. Widely celebrated as one of the week’s most immersive highlights, Mirage Factory extended Prager’s exploration of illusion, desire, and the seductive artifice of American mythology.

We also meet two of the artists who collaborated on the art installation: Gene F. Warren III (Head Compositor / Master Model Maker at Blind Beagle VFX) and Brandon Knight-Warren (Producer at Blind Beagle VFX). Blind Beagle VFX represents three generations of mastery in visual effects. Founded by Christopher Lee Warren (whose credits include landmark films such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Hellboy), the studio carries forward the extraordinary legacy of craftsmanship begun by his father, Gene Warren Jr., and continued from his grandfather, Academy Award–winning pioneer Gene Warren (George Pal’s The Time Machine, 1960). From the groundbreaking fantasy effects of early cinema to the most advanced digital techniques of today, the Warren family has consistently remained at the forefront of cinematic visual storytelling.

Alex Prager, the Los Angeles-based artist, photographer, filmmaker, and director known for her hyper-stylized, surreal tableaux that blend nostalgia, glamour, and unease, debuted her immersive installation Mirage Factory during Miami Art Week 2025. Presented in partnership with Capital One and The Cultivist, the project transformed the historic Beach Theatre—a Streamline Moderne cinema built in 1940 on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach—into a multisensory portal to Los Angeles’ mythic past and present. Housed at 430 Lincoln Road, it ran from December 3 to December 5, 2025.

The installation unfolds as a “visual poem” across three meticulously constructed sets, evoking LA’s evolution from arid promise to cinematic illusion. Prager drew on the city’s foundational contradictions—no water, yet endless reinvention—using to-scale miniatures crafted by a family of model-makers (who’ve collaborated with Wes Anderson). Visitors feel like giants in a dreamscape, towering over vignettes that blur reality and fabrication, inspired by Golden Age Hollywood and Prager’s own Los Feliz roots.

First Room: Artificial Orange Grove – A lush, pre-urbanization idyll representing early 20th-century LA, with hyperreal fruit trees under a painted sky, nodding to the boosters who planted oranges to lure settlers amid water scarcity.

Second Room: Hollywood Boulevard Backdrop – A vibrant dusk scene featuring Thomas Suriya’s iconic “You Are the Star” mural, with glowing neon signs and the hum of ambition.

Third Room: Griffith Park Garden – An emerald-green oasis echoing The Wizard of Oz, complete with a faux pool from which ruby-heeled legs emerge, symbolizing seductive peril and transformation.

Prager’s work probes the “what if” magic of LA—the addictive “beautiful confusion” of corruption, disaster, and possibility—while critiquing manufactured dreams. A gift shop offered exclusive merchandise, with proceeds benefiting Heal the Bay, an LA environmental nonprofit. The experience extended to The Mirage Swim Club at the Shelborne by Proper hotel, featuring a massive Technicolor orange sculpture.

The installation doubled as a hub for exclusive programming: A celebrity chef dinner by James Beard Award-winner Dave Beran on December 3; “Martinis at the Mirage,” a private evening with a surprise musical guest (including a transcendent performance by Diana Ross); A Capital One x W Magazine party on December 5, attended by stars like Alana Haim, Chance the Rapper, Damson Idris, Lori Harvey, Janelle Monáe, Shay Mitchell, and Este Haim.

A live performance brought characters from Prager’s 2025 photograph Beverly Palms Hotel to life, processing through the space after a recorded voiceover: “Welcome to the Mirage Factory, where dreams are made—and broken.” Capital One cardholders accessed VIP perks, including Golden Hour gatherings at the Shelborne.

Mirage Factory aligns with Prager’s oeuvre—seen in projects like Face in the Crowd (2013) and her 2023 solo show at the Garage Museum—extending her exploration of illusion into physical space.

Voloshyn Gallery in Miami presents DISORDER, a solo exhibition by Polish artist Aneta Grzeszykowska. The show brings together earlier and recent works, often using animal skins, hyperrealistic silicone figures, and masks. Grzeszykowska examines existence, mortality, and identity by involving family members, pets, and her own body. In staged photographs and scenarios, she disrupts conventional domestic hierarchies: humans adopt animal traits, objects appear anthropomorphic, and roles within the family are rearranged. Boundaries between human/animal, subject/object, life/death, and youth/age become unstable. Central to the exhibition is THE DAUGHTER (2025), a new series featuring a silicone mask of the artist’s face at age fourteen, worn in photographs with relatives. DOMESTIC ANIMALS (2022) shows the artist’s dogs wearing pigskin masks modeled on her own face. MAMA (2018) presents a life-size silicone replica of the artist photographed with her daughter in various settings. Through these works, Grzeszykowska explores control, kinship, recognition, and the fluidity of selfhood. The exhibition runs until January 10, 2026.

Aneta Grzeszykowska: Disorder / Voloshyn Gallery Miami. November 30, 2025.

Exhibition text:

Voloshyn Gallery is pleased to present DISORDER, a solo exhibition by Aneta
Grzeszykowska.

Spanning from past to recent works, the artist incorporates performance, photography, and object-making, frequently incorporating materials such as animal skins and hyperrealistic replicas. Her practice addresses questions of existence, mortality, and the relationship between body, image, and identity.

In DISORDER, Grzeszykowska engages her immediate environment-family members, domestic animals, and her own body-to reconsider conventional hierarchies within the household. Through staged scenarios, she introduces shifts in roles and identities: humans take on animal attributes, objects assume anthropomorphic qualities, and the artist positions herself in alternate familial roles. The exhibition explores the intersections of control, kinship, and subjectivity, presenting situations in which categories such as human/animal, life/death, and youth/age are unsettled.
The exhibition centers on THE DAUGHTER (2025), a new body of work in which Grzeszykowska employs a hyperrealistic mask based on her own face at the age of fourteen, reconstructed from family photographs. Used in performative photographs with relatives, the mask enables her to reframe her place within domestic dynamics. Its inanimate features emphasize passivity, while the combination of a mature body with a youthful face produces an ambiguous effect that underscores themes of memory, identity, and temporality. Also included is DOMESTIC ANIMALS (2022), where pigskin masks of the artist’s face are fitted onto her dogs. The photographs produced from these interventions examine ideas of recognition, projection, and estrangement.
The exhibition further features MAMA (2018), a hyperrealistic silicone replica of the artist, created with professional fabricators. Photographed alongside her daughter in a range of constructed situations, the figure functions simultaneously as surrogate and object, raising questions about representation, identity, and the unstable boundary between person and image.
With DISORDER, Grzeszykowska continues her investigation into selfhood, mortality, and the shifting relationships among human, animal, and object.

This is a stroll through Art Basel Miami Beach’s 2025 Meridians Sector. Art Basel Miami Beach’s Meridians sector is a dedicated platform for ambitious, large-scale artworks that exceed the dimensions of standard gallery booths, including monumental sculptures, installations, paintings, video projections, and live performances. For the 2025 edition (December 5–7), highlights include landmark pieces by artists such as Jesús Rafael Soto, Luisa Rabbia, Kennedy Yanko, Ward Shelley, and Anne Samat, emphasizing themes of movement, transformation, and diversity.

Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 Meridians Sector. Miami Beach, December 5, 2025.

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Here are some of the highlights of the 2025 edition of Art Basel in Miami Beach.

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