MOONLIGHT AND VANTAGE POINTS

Some of the most striking examples of midcentury Modern residential architecture are nestled in Palm Springs, California. Magazines like Sunset and Look have memorialized landmarks like Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House (1946) and James Frey’s Frey House II (1965) in their glossy pages, seducing readers with pool-side views of sun-drenched mountain ranges or relaxing luncheons in stone-walled living rooms.

A new exhibition at the Palm Springs Art Museum, however, offers a completely new perspective. Lake Verea: DarkRooms and Other Games recasts six of the city’s historic residences through the lens of moonlight, candid moments, and improvised performance art. Though these homes are remembered as sunny getaways for the nuclear family, curator Mimi Zeiger worked with the museum to invite Mexico City-based collective Lake Verea to enliven these dwellings for the present through their queer experience. Using film photography and a combination of strategies like long-exposure, large and medium formats, and impulsively snapping with a handheld helps, partners in life and work Francisca Rivero-Lake Cortina and Carla Verea Hernández remind admirers of the midcentury that though now preserved and often unoccupied, these architectural homes were originally tailored-made for active living. As Julius Shulman’s photography which appears throughout the exhibition as a sort of reference point depicts, these were highly social lives of dinner parties (“Frey (Albert) House II”, 1965), living room lounging with chatter (“Case Study House #22 Two Girls”, 1960), and late night swims (“Kaufmann House”, 1947). In addition to Kaufmann House and Frey House II, Lake Verea reinvigorates this domestic narrative in Frey and A. Lawrence Kocher’s Aluminaire House (1931), Erle Webster and Adrian Wilson’s Ship of the Desert (1936), E. Stewart Williams’s Twin Palms (1947), and William Krisel’s House of Tomorrow (1960). As Zeiger says of her curatorial aim, “the goal is to understand Palm Springs Modernism in a way that takes us out of nostalgia for 1960s luxury and amplifies the way these homes continue to live… different bodies bring out different stories.”

Zeiger began her collaboration with Lake Verea by inviting them to capture Palm Springs for their ongoing DarkRooms series, which turns bustling historic sites into enigmatic locales through heavy shadows, glassy blues, and hushed atmospheres. The show greets viewers with Us As Eyes (2024), a depiction of the artists standing inside Frey II’s living room, facing away from the camera, their gazes aimed towards sunrise, sets a surreal and humorous tone that carries throughout the rest of the show. As they clasp their hands in the air, forming almond-shaped eyes, their two heads become pupils, and the gap between is a nose drawn from light breaking over the horizon. Lake Verea’s bodies become a set of Groucho novelty glasses: a physical rendering of a seemingly joyous outlook on life.

On the surface, DarkRooms feels somber rather than lighthearted. The long-exposure photograph Timelessness (2025) offers an eerie route into the Kaufmann house, where a short flight of stairs leads to slatted metal fencing that evokes medieval pikes more than artful detailing. But sitting with the work in the dim gallery, like how Lake Verea sat during the minutes required to make these images, gives the eye more time to pick up on the beautiful contrast between aluminum window panes and the “Utah buff” stone. This technique pops out more with Aluminaire House. Moonlight Drawings (2024) captures the moon’s fluid contour lines running across the house’s exterior. These C-prints of Frey and A. Lawrence Kocher’s case study are extra velvety due to being printed on an ultra-rare chromogenic film stock, which pulls forth deep blacks that can only be properly experienced in person.

In daylight, Lake Verea explore architecture and each other through playful, candid snapshots known as the Other Games series. The diptych Inside Out (2025), taken on the undulating balcony that Erle Webster and Adrian Wilson designed for Ship of the Desert, which was intended to imitate the stern of a luxury ocean liner, feels like the duo are in the midst of a game of tag. Inside the House of Tomorrow, William Krisel’s abode that became known as Elvis Presley’s Honeymoon Hideaway, In LoooVe (2025) channels marital bliss — the couple is depicted dancing beside a piano.

Lake Verea’s play seeps into sensuality, erasing the boundary between professional and personal. They show love for one another in the triptych First Step, Second Step, and Kiss (all 2025), using their strides to measure a narrow hallway in the Kaufmann House, ending with locked lips. Things get more heated in their Touching Architecture series, taken around House of Tomorrow and Twin Palms, E. Stewart Williams’s estate better known as the Sinatra House. Tipping the Tip (2025) crops a concrete eave into a vulvar form, lingering on a single finger pressed upon its lips.

By photographing the homes from moonlit and erotic vantage points, Lake Verea queers Palm Springs Modernism twice. Rivero-Lake and Verea breathe a second, nocturnal life into the residences, and offer a glimpse into an oasis for joyful queer domesticity. From the archives, Palm Springs Modernism only showcases heteronormative lifestyles, glaringly omitting the region’s gay community, which fully emerged in the 1980s, but always existed in the periphery. With this work, the duo update the record, showing how homes are filled with love around the clock in the twenty-first century.