Known for his work with natural and colored light, James Turrell is recognized as an international leader in the fields of environmental and installation art. His creative use of illumination redefines a viewer’s sense of space, the surrounding environment, and the nature of light itself. Turrell has figured prominently in international art developments for more than three decades, due to his pioneering work in fields as diverse as installation art, earth works, and architectural projects.
Turrell was born in Los Angeles in 1943 and attended Pomona College where he studied mathematics, psychology, and art history before pursuing graduate studies in fine arts at the University of California at Irvine and Claremont Graduate School. He began working with light in the mid-1960s at a time when the so-called Light and Space group of artists in Los Angeles, including Robert Irwin and Doug Wheeler, was coming into prominence.
In early works such as his 1967 Cross Corner Projections, beams of light projected onto walls or into corners appear to take on a palpable geometric volume. In Turrell’s Wedgework Series and Ganzfeld Pieces, for which he came to be best known, he floods interior spaces with colored light, creating environments in which viewers feel absorbed into dense, haze-like atmospheres of color wherein perceptions of outer boundaries and the definition of surrounding space are thoroughly masked. The result is a fully engaging, sometimes surprising and disorienting sensory experience. A central component in these and later works is the viewer’s heightened awareness of the relationship between body and self with the surrounding environment and a greater concentration on one’s own sensory mechanisms.
In the 1970s, Turrell began his series of "skyspaces" enclosed spaces open to the sky through an aperture in the roof, like Tending, (Blue) at the Nasher Sculpture Center. Several permanent “skyspaces” have been built around the world including one at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, the Live Oak Friends Meeting House in Houston, and The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington in Seattle.
In 1977 he launched the most ambitious project of his career, and one of the most spectacularly monumental art works of the modern era, when he purchased Roden Crater on the edge of Arizona’s Painted Desert near Flagstaff. For more than 25 years he has been excavating, carving, and transforming this volcanic mountain, creating in the bowl of the crater and underground a variety of chambers, passages, and viewing spaces from which to observe certain celestial occurrences and effects of light and sky. To date he has moved more than 1,350,000 cubic yards of rock and gravel in reshaping the crater’s bowl and carving out its interior spaces. Roden Crater has been referred to as "a secular cathedral dedicated to the heavens and their light." It will open to the public in approximately two to three years.
Works by Turrell are also featured in the permanent collections of other major museums including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and The Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
www.rodencrater.org
www.henryart.org/skyspace.htm