James Turrell is an artist primarily concerned with light and space. He was born on May 6, 1943 in Pasadena, California. Turrell was a MacArthur fellow in 1984. He was represented by the Pace Gallery in New York City. Turrell received a pilot’s license when he was 16 years old. He studied psychology and mathematics and got a BA in psychology at Pomona College in 1965 and later, he pursued art. He received a Masters of Fine Arts from the Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, California in 1966. Turrell’s work explores light and space that speaks to viewers without words, impacting the eye, body, and mind with the force of a spiritual awakening.
Turrell’s Roden Crater links heaven to earth, there by connecting the actions of people with the movements of planets and galaxies. His fascination with the phenomena of light reflects his personal, inward search for mankind’s place in the universe. Turrell’s art encourages greater self-awareness by a thoughtful practice of silent contemplation, patience, and meditation. His ethereal installations enlist light to communicate feelings of transcendence and the Divine. Roden Crater is best known as a work in progress. Turrell is turning this natural cinder volcanic crater into a massive naked-eye observatory, designed specifically for the viewing of celestial phenomena.
His other works usually enclose the viewer in order to control their perception of light. A James Turrell Skyspace is an enclosed room large enough for roughly 15 people. Inside, the viewers sit on benches along the edge to view the sky through an opening in the roof. In this work he is controlling the viewers’ perception.
He is also known for his light tunnels and light projections that create shapes that seem to have mass and weight, though they are created with only light. Turrell designed the Live Oak Meeting House for the Society of Friends, with an opening or skyhole in the roof, so that light takes on a decidedly religious connotation as God coming down from above.
James Turrell opened The James Turrell Museum at the Bodega Colomé in the Province of Salta, in Argentina in April 2009. It was designed by Turrell after Donald Hess, the owner of the Bodega and owner of a few of Turell's works, told him he wanted to dedicate a museum to his work. It contains nine light installations, including a skyspace (Unseen Blue) and some drawings and prints. His work Acton is a very popular exhibit at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Turrell creates an optical illusion in which the viewer in the beginning sees the opening as a flat, monochromatic surface. Prolonged viewing leads to a surprising shift in perception, as the viewer may see and even reach into the sensing space.
In October 2009, the “Wolfsburg Project,” Turrell’s largest exhibition in Germany to date, opened and continued through to October 2010. Among the works featured in the Wolfsburg Project is Ganzfeld or Spread, a series of light installations that cover 70 square meters in area and 12 meters in height. When you enter Spread, a long room filled with blue neon and fluorescent light, it's like stepping through a screen, allowing you to pass from one dimension into another. The room, it turns out, is much longer than it seems--Spread is what's known as a Ganzfeld, or a field of light that flattens depth, removing all the usual orientational cues that humans depend on. Toward the back of the room the light turns into something gaseous, almost approaching solidit. But your own eyes have created this situation.
For me I thought his Ganzfeld work looks like 3-D. It is bright and colorful and makes a person feel insignificant in the light of the heavens and the vastness of the universe. Roden Crater reminds me of a huge eyes ranging across the skies, seeing all like God would.
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