James turrell mass moca11/6/2023 ![]() You feel as if you’d plunge off the edge of the world if you moved too far forward (though you’d only fall off an invisible drop, if you ignore the warning marks and sounds). (The room reflects Turrell’s experience as a pilot in the air, losing the horizon line can lead to dangerous consequences.) A high and broad expanse of totally uncertain depth opens in front of you, suffused with changing colors interrupted at the front by periodic strobe-like patterns. Without depth perception or other visual clues, you can’t tell where the two-story room, with its curved walls, begins and ends. From the entrance room, you ascend a short staircase to the primary space and are immediately disoriented. Only a few people are allowed in the room at a time (after donning booties to protect the white floor), so everyone can get the most out of the experience. Perfectly Clear (Ganzfeld) (1991), the world’s largest Ganzfeld (an undifferentiated visual field that causes the loss of depth perception), offers another example at a different scale. ![]() One room is blank except for a corner into which white light is projected to form a cube with an A pioneer of the Southern California Light and Space movement, who trained in psychology and mathematics as well as art, he began using light (or its absence) as a sculptural medium in 1966. “Into the Light” provides an excellent introduction to Turrell’s fascination with and experimental approach to light as form. In addition to installations from all six decades of his career, the show features several models related to Roden Crater, which give a sense of the project’s many facets, including the tunnels that link the various rooms. While “Into the Light,” which remains on view at least through 2019, isn’t quite on the scale of Roden Crater, it is the largest collection of Turrell’s works ever assembled at one site. To make this lasting contribution to the study of light, Turrell removed 1.3 million cubic yards of earth from within the cinder core of the crater so that visitors could look up and experience the sky as a solid dome rather than an unlimited void. He acquired the site in 1977 and has been working on it ever since. If people know one thing about James Turrell, it’s his vast Roden Crater project in the desert northeast of Flagstaff, Arizona.
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