After the success of his retrospective exhibition in Los Angeles this year, the James Turrell retrospective exhibition in Canberra is an incredibly ambitious venture for this gallery.

The show will occupy the entire temporary exhibition space of the gallery for the next six months and despite the extended opening hours and the hefty admission price of $45.88 to see the exhibition and the perceptual cell, supply is unlikely to meet demand. My simple advice is book early, be patient and definitely include the perceptual cell in your booking.

What is so special about James Turrell? He is a 71-year-old Californian artist who has devoted his entire art practice to light and perception. However, unlike the painters of light, such as Turner and Monet, Turrell sculpts and creates with light, so that it affects our psyche and the way we relate to the world that surrounds us. He revels in his ability to disorientate us and then lead us into colour-saturated and sometimes psychedelic visions, but without the use of hallucinogenic drugs.

His research into the nature of light and colour, on one hand points back to the colour theorists and colour field artists, including Johannes Itten, Josef Albers and Ellsworth Kelly, while on the other hand it brings to mind the practice of neon artists, especially Dan Flavin and his constructed light. The principle around which many of the exhibits are built is that when you look at a field of colour, especially on a large scale, you experience an afterimage, which may be very different to the original catalyst. Turrell, a lifelong Quaker, is interested in the spiritual dimension of light as a path to experiencing the divine and what could be termed the "out-of-body" experience.

Light tunnels, light projections and holograms are all part of his art practice and are all part of his general philosophy to slow down the art-viewing experience and to alter the shape of time. The perceptual cell, Bindu shards, 2010, is the key part of this retrospective exhibition. Viewers are admitted into the large fibreglass and metal sphere, they are slid individually on a bed into the space, as if for a full-body CT scan, and then they are exposed for 11 minutes to ever-changing flashing patterns of stars, crystals, galaxies, quasars and nebulae. This completely disorienting experience breaks down your barriers and you are admitted into a meditative state. For me my 11 minutes passed too quickly and I was ready for a longer emersion. This installed environment has been acquired by the National Gallery, so that my daydream may prove to be a reality.

The other key attraction is Virtuality squared, 2014, one of Turrell's famous Ganzfelds, from the German for "complete field". The ganzfeld effect is ancient: the followers of Pythagoras sought wisdom in the blackness of a cave where they experienced visions, and this was in vogue in the 1930s when "scientific experiments" established that people would hallucinate after staring into a field of vision. Turrell's Ganzfeld leads us into a hallucinatory state, one where I experienced a sense of weightlessness and I seemed to be floating on a cloud of nothingness.

Apart from these and other installed environments, the exhibition is rich in documentation of the artist's various projects from the past four decades, including the Mendota Hotel, his Santa Monica studio, various aquatints as records of his different experiments, plus documentation of his life-long obsession with the Roden Crater, near Flagstaff in Arizona. Turrell acquired this extinct cinder cone volcanic crater in 1979 and ever since has been converting it into a huge naked-eye observatory.

This exhibition is not for everyone, but for anyone interested in the psycho-physical properties of light, space and colour and the effects this has on our perception, this is a must-see event. I found myself constantly wishing to be alone in these spaces and wanted to slowly dissolve into space, losing a conscious awareness of physicality and of material existence. Like very few artists, Turrell is a master in manipulating our environment so that what we once thought were the permanent facts in our physical existence become as light as clouds and drift away into a fathomless universe. It is a celebration of light as a path to boundless freedom.