James Turrell
For over half a century, the American artist James Turrell has worked directly with light and space to create artworks that engage viewers with the limits and wonder of human perception. Turrell, an avid pilot who has logged over twelve thousand hours flying, considers the sky as his studio, material and canvas. New Yorker critic Calvin Tompkins writes, “His work is not about light, or a record of light; it is light — the physical presence of light made manifest in sensory form.”
“My work is more about your seeing than it is about my seeing, although it is a product of my seeing. I’m also interested in the sense of presence of space; that is space where you feel a presence, almost an entity — that physical feeling and power that space can give.”
Roden Crater, located in the Painted Desert region of Northern Arizona, is an unprecedented large-scale artwork created within a volcanic cinder cone by light and space artist James Turrell. Representing the culmination of the artist’s lifelong research in the field of human visual and psychological perception, Roden Crater is a controlled environment for the experiencing and contemplation of light.
“When I first met Fram Kitagawa, he asked me to make a “meditation house” for the Echigo-Tsumari region. He gave me a book written by Junichiro Tanizaki “In Praise of Shadows.” The condition he gave me was that the house must be raised over 2.7m above the ground because of snow covering in winter. After reading “In Praise of Shadows”, I decided to create a house in the traditional architectural manner of this region. I wished to realize the “ world of shadows we are losing,” as Tanizaki wrote, as a space where one can experience living in light, by relating light inside to light outside.”
Read a review of House of Light on Elizabeth Mueller blog, photograph by Yulia Skogoreva
Ganzfeld
Turrell creates a similar experience of “Ganzfeld”: a German word to describe the phenomenon of the total loss of depth perception as in the experience of a white-out.
