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13 October 2006 - 28 February 2007
Raethro, Pink, 1968
Projection work, Courtesy Albion, London
© James Turrell, Photo: Florian Holzherr |
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Fastnet, 1992
Space Division, Arcus Series, Courtesy Albion, London
© James Turrell, Photo: Florian
Holzherr |
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Shanta, Red, 1968
Projection work, Courtesy Albion, London
© James Turrell. Photo: Richard Nicol |
Light is everywhere. Existence is impossible without it. For
this reason, perhaps, light appears over and over again as
a symbol in the world’s greatest poems, paintings and
novels.
Visual artists such as Turrell seem to suggest that light
can salvage a soul, can bring us meaning and bear messages
that allow us to live with some measure of grace. The paintings
of Vermeer are experiments with light – its intimacy,
its intensity and its emotional power.
But light is perhaps best understood outside a moral framework
- as pure force, as pouring source, as the absolute essence
of biological life on this planet called earth, this planet
made possible by our singular sun, 93 million miles away from
us, our very own mid-life star that radiates out across our
solar system, illuminating objects as far away as Pluto, or
as near as our hearts and skin.
Light. What is it? It is wave and particle. It is, when parsed,
seven sturdy colours from which spring every other hue and
tone. It is muscular enough to traverse vast distances, so
when you stare into the night sky and see a star up there,
you are in fact seeing ancient illumination, a star that may
in fact no longer exist – we have no way of knowing.
Is the North Star still alive? The light it emits now is in
fact from 1812; it takes that many years to reach us. In turn,
were an alien civilization to peer down at our sun-saturated
globe, it would be seeing a reflection that was thousands,
if not millions of years old.
Light. At first there was none. At first all of space was
collapsed into a dot smaller than the period at the end of
this sentence, so dense that a teaspoon would weigh more than
a trillion tons. And then, the big bang, contested for sure,
but it is all we have to go on. The primal dot of darkness
exploded into the universe, exploded in a roar and rush of
light so intense it is beyond the brain to ever even really
imagine it. The universe was born in light. We are alive because
of light. We can make of light as many symbols and superstitions
as we wish, but for what? Light has no need.
Turrell’s work is powerful in part because he knows
this; he seeks not to enhance light, but simply to reveal its
place in our singular lives, in the history of human kind stretching
back to the first flame a human ever found, and then forward,
into the cascades of galaxies that suggest, in their distant
shimmers, who we may someday become.
It is strange, to me, that we live in a light-filled world
on the one hand, and yet in such darkness on the other. Whether
the depth of this darkness is unique to our times, or in fact
has been the fate of human kind since civilization first appeared,
is really a question of little consequence. The question of
real consequence is: how can we let light educate us? How can
we become en-lightened by light? What can its form,
its physics, its existence, impart to us about how to live
our lives?
Louise Blouin MacBain, 2006
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“If we define art as part of the realm of experience, we can assume
that after a viewer looks at a piece he leaves with the art, because the ‘art’ has
been experienced.”
James Turrell
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