Overview
James Turell, a Californian artist who has worked with light and perception as his media and subject matter since the 1960s, apparently studied perceptual psychology, mathematics, astronomy and geology at university before he moved into art history. He has recalled that during the lectures he was more enthralled by the illuminated dust particles in front the projectors than the images themselves, and when he finally saw real paintings by Rothko and other artists he deeply admired, he had felt disappointed that they lacked the luminosity they had as projected slides in the lecture halls.
In 1966 Turrell rented out an old hotel in Santa Monica and turned it into his studio where he set about exploring light and the way it inhabits space. He started working with projected artificial light that was molded to give the illusion of mass and volume, and he made his first 'Structural Cuts' to the building's facade, abstracting external light from the city and the sun as pure geometric shapes. These led to Turrell's ongoing body of Skyspaces, where visitors look up at the wide blue yonder through a hole in the roof, and the enormous volume of the atmosphere appears to sit on the ceiling as a two dimensional image.
The artist was evicted from the Mendota Hotel in 1974, losing not only his studio but a whole body of work. In the same year he received a Guggenheim grant for a new site-specific project that would develop many of the ideas initiated at the Mendota, but with a radically different scale and setting. According to Turrell legend, he spent the entire grant on airplane fuel and flew around the western United States on his own for seven months, looking for the perfect dormant volcano, finally settling on his 500,000-year-old Roden Crater. Part monumental land art, part naked eye observatory, the Rodan Crater has been an eagerly anticipated work in progress for over three decades, and still hasn't opened to the public.
Meanwhile, however, a major new permanent Skyspace has just burst out of the earth at the National Gallery in Canberra, marking the first time Turrell has been commissioned in Australia. Set to open in spring, Within, without leads visitors to sit in a sparse domed room that forms a stage for diurnal celestial cycles, where we look at projected light in and of itself, rather than at what it illuminates.
