Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/641424
CULTURED 181 "Nature loves the ellipse." —James Turrell changes to his work. In the Perceptual Cell series begun in the late 1970s, Turrell creates immersive capsules in which single viewers experience changing artificial light effects. At Turrell's LACMA retrospective, participants queued up to lie inside Light Reignfall (2011), a sphere fitted with hidden LEDs, where they witnessed a 12-minute cycle of rapidly flashing colors; many people reported seeing psychedelic patterns and experiencing feelings of disembodiment. A subsequent Perceptual Cell, Inside My Head (2013), seen at Kayne Griffin Corcoran, is even more advanced, says Kayne. The technology is developing so quickly. Turrell uses a palette of seven colored lights to achieve the richness he needs in these works: red, green and blue—the fundamentals—and then amber, then a warm white and a cold white, and finally a more saturated blue. In the large, wall-mounted ovals recently displayed at Kayne Griffin Corcoran, soft concentric rings of colored light wax and wane behind frosted glass. Each of these Elliptical Glass pieces is named for a southern cape, and is, in a sense, a portrait of that place: The composition for Cape Hope (S. Africa) (2015), Turrell explains, consists of large swells with occasional chaotic interruptions. "Nature loves the ellipse," Turrell has said. But he also tells me that these pieces were inspired by Aten Reign, the vast elliptical environment that he installed in the rotunda of New York's Guggenheim in 2013. At Kayne Griffin Corcoran, depictions of that work were translated both into digital inkjet prints and woodcuts. Turrell is an artist just as open to traditional techniques as he is to the latest technology. His meditations on the vastest expanses of cosmic distance and time provide him with a long view of technology— he is neither phobic nor fetishistic. (Often he pulls out his iPhone 6s Plus to search for a reference to some archaeoastronomer or other.) His work has little to do with modernity, but modern innovations give him access to ever-finer degrees of perfectionism. This is what really excites him. When he says that he has OCD, I ask if he is being serious. "I've made a career out of it!" he laughs. Maggie Kayne in front of Turrell's Elliptical Glass.