“He’s a local boy done good,” says LACMA director Michael Govan, describing artist James Turrell who is known for his mesmerizing works incorporating visible light and for the skyspaces he constructs to view patches of the upper atmosphere. Turrell, who was born in Pasadena in 1943, has created skyspaces for California art collectors throughout the state including Norah and Norman Stone who had one constructed on their 17-acre Napa Valley property, Stonescape. Describing his art, Turrell says, “I like to see light as we see it in a dream. It’s light that we know but we don’t see it very often with our eyes open.” Naturally, many of the works require a large amount of exhibition space and the show, James Turrell: A Retrospective, includes installations at both the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and the Resnick Pavilion. Govan noted that Turrell’s art requires a certain square footage commitment from museums that display it. “To shape light you have to build a lot of space and let people into the spaces,” he says.

In addition to the LACMA exhibition (on view through April 6, 2014), Kayne Griffin Corcoran Gallery is opening its new 15,000-square-foot space on South La Brea with Sooner Than Later, Roden Crater (through July 20). The show charts the progress of Turrell’s vision for a series of interior and exterior spaces to view direct light from the sun, moon and stars. “If you find yourself in the middle of nowhere, you’re near my work,” says Turrell, who notes that the sky looks different everywhere he goes. He describes the skies here in the southland as soft and beautiful while he notes that Arizona skies are hard and crisp. The L.A.-based firm Standard renovated the La Brea gallery and Turrell created a permanent skyspace there in addition to designing the lighting for the interiors and the courtyard. The idea of having one’s work lit by Turrell must be the stuff of dreams for Kayne Griffin Corcoran’s stable of artists.

Turrell says that his enclosures arrest and apprehend light. “I have a business selling blue sky and colored light,” he jokes after noting that he follows in the tradition of J. M. W. Turner, Johannes Vermeer, the Impressionist painters and Rothko. And his works can be communal experiences (guests sit on benches together inside skyspaces) or they can be intensely personal. At LACMA, his perceptual cell called Light Reignfall (2011) opens the doors of perception to one person at a time, and the guest experiences the work by lying on a bed of sorts that is rolled into a large pod (imagine an MRI machine inside a dome that resembles a mini-observatory). Slots for this part of the exhibition are already booked through August, so plan your total immersion soon.

By Elizabeth Varnell

Pictured: Twilight Epiphany by James Turrell, 2012
A James Turrell Skyspace, The Suzanne Deal Booth Centennial Pavilion, Rice University, Houston, TX

 

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