You walk into a room and are immediately captivated by a glowing cube in the corner. Emanating a cool, bright light, it appears to be hovering several feet off the ground. As you walk closer to it, you feel the urge to touch it – it seems as though you could lightly bat it around the room like a balloon.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
But suddenly, as you stand before the cube, you come to the realisation that there is nothing there. This apparition is nothing more than a projection of lights, with no physical object in sight. Your mind has been playing tricks on you.
It may sound like something out of science fiction, but this is a description of James Turrell's installation Afrum, and is just one of the incredible experiences in store for visitors who attend the National Gallery of Australia's upcoming exhibition James Turrell: A Retrospective.
Turrell may not be one of the most recognisable names in art, but to Canberrans he is already well-known as the creator of Within without, the beautiful Skyspace installation that has been intriguing and delighting visitors to the National Gallery since 2010.
"I'm really thrilled the way Skyspace has been adopted in Canberra," National Gallery curator for international art Lucina Ward says.
"People really feel a sense of involvement and a sense of ownership in that work.
"Part of the reason that we're terribly excited about this upcoming exhibition is that it is a survey of 50 years of the artist's practice, and also it allows us to put this work [Skyspace] in greater context."
Ward worked with a small team at the gallery and with Turrell himself to put the exhibition together, and says that she could not be more thrilled to be presenting it to the people of Canberra.
It includes a selection of more than 50 works over a range of mediums, many as part of a touring component from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, some that have been acquired for the gallery's collection, and even some installations that Turrell has purpose-built for this Canberra exhibition.
Ward explains that Turrell, an American contemporary artist known for his installation art, works in many mediums, but for the past 50 years he has been making waves in the art world with his ground-breaking work using light projections, influenced heavily by his training as a perceptual psychologist, his upbringing as a Quaker and his experience as a pilot.
"Turrell is part of the light and space movement that came out of California in the 1960s, and since then, particularly since the late 1980s and 1990s, he has gone on to develop these extravagant, really intriguing, dramatic and spectacular works of art," she says.
"Sometimes he works in the environment, most obviously in the case of Roden Crater, the naked-eye observatory that he's building in a volcano in Arizona, or the Skyspaces like the National Gallery's one Within without, set within the garden. Or interior installations, like the Ganzfeld, which we're building, which takes up one of the gallery's largest spaces and measures 16 by eight metres.
"So the whole idea for Turrell is that he works with light. He says that light is really difficult to shape – you can't carve it, it's a little closer to what you might do with music in that you need to compose it. So in working with light and all of the different forms of light he needs to shape everything around that light."
Ward says that James Turrell: A Retrospective will be a very different kind of experience for visitors to the gallery. It's a far cry from walking through the rooms looking at pretty pictures in gold frames – no more than 150 people will be allowed in the entire exhibition at any one time, in order to encourage the kind of experience and interaction that Turrell's work demands.
"These are works of art that the visitor needs to enter, to interact with," Ward says.
"By allowing ourselves to take the time to be saturated by the light and the extraordinary things that James Turrell does with human perception, we actually experience how seeing can affect our bodies, our emotions, the way in which we feel in a particular sort of space.
"I think it's one of the most extraordinary projects the National Gallery has ever done."
The National Gallery is encouraging anyone and everyone to come and see the exhibition, as photographs can't even come close to capturing the experience of being enveloped in a Turrell installation.
"It is the viewer's experience of these works of art that's so important," Ward says.
"They're really difficult to describe. I can tell you a few things about what I've experienced in these works, but you might find something completely different."
Those planning to visit James Turrell: A Retrospective should book early, as spaces are limited.
James Turrell: A Retrospective
Where: National Gallery of Australia
When: December 13 to June 8
Cost: Adults from $25, children/students/members from $20
Website: nga.gov.au
