The Movie Magic Behind Alex Prager’s Most Ambitious Work Yet

In a week defined by art-world spectacle, Alex Prager has constructed her own: a hauntingly beautiful, meticulously crafted Hollywood that spins inside a former Miami Beach cinema. Her installation, “Mirage Factory,” is a tribute to her hometown of Los Angeles—but also a subtle critique of the illusions that power it.

By transplanting L.A.’s icons, myths, and anxieties to Miami, Prager extends her long-running fascination with the cinematic imagination and the strange, seductive narratives we project onto cities. The installation also showcases a new photograph from the artist, who is known for her images that resemble film stills and reference the golden age of cinema. Prager not only draws on the visual language of Old Hollywood, but actually stages each photograph much like you would shoot a movie, complete with special effects. “Mirage Factory” offers a window into the scale of her world-building and the emotional undercurrents that shape her practice, revealing why her blend of glamour and unease continues to resonate so widely.

“Usually, the viewers don’t get to see the actual worlds I’ve created…the set pieces and locations that I build for my photographs,” Prager explained during a walk-through of the exhibition yesterday. “I always thought it would be really nice to be able to build something so people could see the inner process, and it would take them through a kind of visual poem of the city that’s so much a part of who I am.”

A self-taught artist who dropped out of high school, Prager is as much a storyteller as she is a photographer. Her images and short films often feel slightly surreal, the artificiality of her carefully crafted scenes blurring the lines between fact and fiction. And this work is infused with her abiding love for the Los Angeles, which she sees as full of possibility—home to millions of dreamers who bring to it their hopes and optimism.

Her Miami moment includes not only the ambitious “Mirage Factory,” but a new work, , which is prominently displayed at Art Basel Miami Beach with longtime dealer Lehmann Maupin. (She will have a New York solo show with the gallery next year.)

Bringing the West Coast to South Beach

Fittingly located inside the former Beach Theatre, a shuttered Miami Beach movie theater, “Mirage Factory” is the latest offering from private art club and creative agency the Cultivist, created in partnership with Capital One Bank. The project opened with two nights of private events—one for Capital One cardholders, and the second for the Cultivist’s community of art world insiders such as artists Sam Falls, Es Devlin, and Nate Lewis and public arts guru Yvonne Force Villareal.

The installation also features an Emerald City-inspired dining room meant to evoke a garden in L.A.’s Griffith Park, where Dave Beran, chef and owner of Santa Monica restaurants Seline and Pasjoli, served up a multi-course meal focused on California produce. On night two, the chef greeted guests as they entered with an utterly unique bite of local mustard greens dipped first in passion fruit juice and then in dry ice. It created three distinct moments, starting with the frozen crunch, followed by tangy sweetness and the peppery bite of the mustard greens.

As if the high-end dining experience wasn’t enough, the evening also featured a thrilling live performance from none other than Diana Ross. Fewer than 200 enthralled guests sang along as the Queen of Motown crooned such hits as “Stop! In the Name of Love” and “I’m Coming Out.”

From December 4, “Mirage Factory” is open to the public, who can walk through Prager’s miniature world, purchase themed merchandise—proceeds to benefit L.A. environmental nonprofit Heal the Bay—and see her latest work, . It depicts a crowded cocktail party scene characterized with her signature cinematic glamor, laced with slightly sinister undertones. (The opening festivities also included a performance with all of the photograph’s subjects, in costume and full makeup, including some prosthetic noses and ears.)

With “Mirage Factory” Prager wanted to pay homage to the history of Los Angeles. The display begins with a tranquil orange grove, harkening back to Southern California’s former identity as the so-called Orange Empire—hundreds of thousands of orange trees once grew in L.A. County. This thriving industry dried up in the years after World War II, as demand for housing soared and the city’s population exploded. It is reborn here, replete with the piped-in scent of citrus.

Next comes Prager’s miniature city, where landmarks like the Pantages Theater and the Hollywood Hotel are created in 1:12 scale, with hand-painted fabric backdrops. It’s absolutely mesmerizing, and full of clever little details, like Spider-Man sitting on a bench. Months in the making, the piece was fabricated with a family-owned miniature making business that Prager has worked with for close to 20 years.

“Anytime I have an idea for something, we just figure it out together,” Prager said.

A soundtrack speaks to the fragile state of this bustling metropolis, threatened by the Santa Ana winds, water scarcity, wildfires, and earthquakes, plays as you move through the space. “The city never should have existed in the first place. There’s nothing there to support a city naturally,” Prager said. And yet, against all odds, a city blossomed and became a creative engine, telling the world’s stories on screen.

A Love for All Things Cinema

“This show is really about the state of Hollywood and what movies mean to us,” Prager added. She actually had a brief career as a child actor, starring opposite a two-headed animatronic man in a 1990 episode of . The experience proved formative, giving rise to a lifelong interest in special effects and the craftsmanship of film that has proved integral to her adult practice. (At one point, our interview was briefly interrupted by Prager’s eight-year-old son, Francis, who loves to help use the fog machine and other gadgets during her shoots.)

Another early influence came through Prager’s grandmother. “All her friends were actors or starlets,” she said. And when Prager expressed interest in their work, they would give her their old costumes, wigs, and film props, seeding the beginnings of a now-massive archive stored in her Silver Lake studio.

The artist is also looking forward to her feature film directorial debut, starring John C. Reilly, Elizabeth Banks, and Juliette Lewis. Titled , it’s a psychological thriller set in what Prager described as the “retro future”. Written by Prager and her sister, Vanessa Prager, it tells the story of a woman who visits a retreat for some health care, only to be replaced at work and at home with an android clone of herself.

“It kind of spirals into this sort of feeling as things start going wrong,” Prager said. The project is in many ways the natural evolution of her career, given the artist’s fascination with Hollywood.

Despite these new ventures, Prager continues to craft visual narratives through still images, such as her new photo at the fair, . Priced at $55,000 in an edition of six, the work sold out on opening day. It offers a domestic scene from a Los Angeles pool house overlooking houses perched on the hillside.

It has an intriguing cast of characters: A woman in an elegant red dress, building a house of cards on a table, a pool boy with a sculpted physique, and, in the shadows in the foreground, what appears to be a maid in tears. The perspective and depth of field in the work are strange, forcing the viewer to take a second look.

“I love the forced perspective, and just playing with scales, distorting it ever so slightly, so then you’re never quite able to stand on solid ground—but you feel like you are because there’s so many familiar archetypes and characters,” Prager said.

She declined to reveal her own backstory for the photograph, other than that it was inspired by the composition of the cover of the compilation album (2001).

“People make up their own stories, and when it’s not the same, it’s kind of disappointing to them,” Prager said. “Oftentimes their stories are better anyway.”

In much the same way, Prager appreciates the multiplicity of viewpoints of Los Angeles that have been captured by the film industry. It is a city that is almost known better through the bright lights of the cinema, where the romanticized myth of the place somehow captures an essential truth of its being. She is creating work that adds to the mythology, rather than trying to render it in documentary style.

“I’m Los Angeles born and raised, and have always lived there,” Prager said. “I have tried to leave, but I always get pulled right back. There’s a madness to it, and there’s corruption, and it can be really ugly, and it’s constantly changing on you when you don’t want it to, and it’s very impermanent, but underneath all of that, there’s this feeling of ‘what if’. There’s a magic that you don’t really get from any other city, and that magic is addictive, in a way, ’cause you always feel like anything is possible.”