James Turrell
Light and space movement
James Turrell is an American artist known for his work within the Light and Space movement.
As said by James Turrell, “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.”
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 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.”
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-1960s. The Pasadena Art Museum mounted a one-person show of his Projection Pieces, created with high-intensity projectors and precisely modified spaces 1967. 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. These investigations aligned and mixed interior and exterior elements, forming the groundwork for the open sky spaces found in his later Skyspace, Tunnel and Crater artworks.
Turrell often cites the Parable of Plato’s Cave to introduce the notion that we live in a reality of our creation, subject to our human sensory limitations and contextual and cultural norms. This is evident in Turrell’s over eighty Skyspaces, chambers with an aperture in the ceiling open to the sky. The simple act of witnessing the sky from within a Turrell Skyspace, notably at dawn and dusk, reveals how we internally create the colours we see and, thus, our perceived reality.
In 1977, Turrell began a monumental project at Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in northern Arizona. Continuing the practice that started in his Ocean Park studio, Turrell sculpted the dimensions of the crater bowl and cut a series of chambers, tunnels, and apertures within the volcano that heightened our sense of the heavens and earth. While Roden Crater is yet to be opened to the public, Turrell has installed works in twenty-two countries and seventeen US states that are open to the public or can be viewed by appointment. Agua de Luz, a series of Skyspaces and pools constructed within a pyramid in the Yucatán, and forthcoming projects worldwide, from Ras al-Khaimah to Tasmania, integrate many principles and features embedded within Roden Crater.
Turrell’s medium is pure light. He says, “My work has no object, no image and no focus. With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking. What is important to me is to create an experience of wordless thought.”
