![]() This is evident in Turrell’s over eighty “Skyspaces”, chambers with an aperture in the ceiling open to the sky. ![]() ![]() Turrell often cites the Parable of Plato’s Cave to introduce the notion that we are living in a reality of our own creation, subject to our human sensory limitations as well as contextual and cultural norms. These investigations aligning and mixing interior and exterior, formed the groundwork for the open sky spaces found in his later “Skyspace”, “Tunnel” and “Crater” artworks. “Mendota Stoppages”, a series of light works created and exhibited in his Santa Monica studio, paired Projection Pieces with structural cuts in the building, creating apertures open to the light outside. Informed by his training in perceptual psychology and a childhood fascination with light, Turrell began experimenting with light as a medium in southern California in the mid-1960’s. Look longer still and it will seem quite visible, your perceptions having sharpened in the dim light. When your eyes have adjusted at last to the darkness, a fuzzy rectangle of pale pink appears in front of you. As the seconds pass and your pupils open, you begin to experience a floating sensation. To view “Pink Mist” you must extend your trust to the artist and step into a short but winding and claustrophobic pitch-black hallway, then wait, blind and vulnerable, for your eyes to adjust. Turrell refers to these types of pieces that use cut-out spaces to create such an illusion as Corner Shallow Space works. In “Raethro II (Magenta)” cutouts in the wall filled with diffuse colored light provides the illusion of a three-dimensional floating object. Light is projected from a corner of the room near the ceiling, casting a shape on the opposite side of the room, as a white cube seems to float in the corner of the room. The piece uses light as a sculptural medium. “Afrum”, a projection on loan from the Guggenheim, is one of Turrell’s earliest works on view. The space is not about what one is supposed to see but the experience of “seeing yourself see” as Turrell describes. ![]() Once seated, the viewer spends 10 to 15 minutes waiting for their pupils to fully dilate, at which point they begin to notice the faint presence of a dim light. Devoid of any visual stimuli, it’s all at once disorienting. The sensory deprivation experiment “Hind Sight (Dark Space)” guides the viewer through a dark corridor with the help of handrails into an even darker chamber. Early in his career, Turrell conducted experiments based on the Ganzfeld effect, where the viewer experiences a loss of depth perception caused by exposure to an unstructured, uniform field lacking aural or visual stimulation, as in a whiteout. “Perfectly Clear (Ganzfeld)”, a two-story installation, is the centerpiece of the retrospective. There are nine Turrell rooms to experience in the expanded exhibition space of the Museums newly opened, Building 6. James Turrell’s retrospective “Into the Light” at MASS MoCA brings together light installations from every stage of the 74-year-old artist’ five-decade career. Turrell transforms light into art by manipulating the viewer’s experience of it, testing the limits of these two ideas, both of which are fundamental to Conceptual art. Turrell’s work lies at the intersection of two ideas: that art can be made with non-traditional materials, and that an artwork might be an idea or an experience, as opposed to a thing. Since the 1960s, James Turrell has created an expansive body of work that offers profound revelations about perception and the materiality of light.
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