I visited the James Turrell Skyspace at Pomona College
James Turrell is a US artist who works primarily with light and architecture. He's designed an extremely large number of installations and physical spaces which use LEDs, smooth white surfaces, or windowed views of the sky to create bizarre, illusory color experiences.
Gamers are probably most familiar with him through Bubsy 3d: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective, a completely perfect videogame made by the Arcane Kids. It features Bubsy attending a highly specific 2013-2014 LACMA exhibit about Turrell. If you haven't played this game you should stop everything and play it immediately. (It has no bearing on this blog post. I just like it a lot.)
I've seen Turrell's installations in a few museums before, but I'd never been in one of his "Skyspaces" - outdoor installations designed to frame the sky specifically. There are quite a few of them in the LA area, but a lot of them are in residences. The easiest one for the public to attend is Dividing The Light, a Skyspace at Pomona College out in Claremont. So I went!!
Dividing the Light is a lightshow program where LEDs project slowly-morphing colors onto the inside of a kind of large gazebo structure. It plays at dawn and at sunset every single day. The gazebo has a big hole in the center which frames the sky above. It lasts for as long as it takes for the sky to rapidly change color during this time of day. For the evening program, we saw it run from around 6:44 to around 7:20-something. It started when the sky was clear blue and ended when it was completely black.
The thing about this exhibit is that photographing it is kind of pointless. The experience is about watching the colors slowly change over time, and contemplating how the changing color of the large frame surface inside the gazebo changes your perception of the color of the sky. It really kind of has to be seen to be believed! When the frame color is yellow, it makes the sky look very luminously blue. When it is purple, it sort of drains the color from the sky and makes it look a kind of unsettling, murky, tornado-alley green.
When the frame seemed to drain the sky of color, when it looked grey or grey-green, I could suddenly see a very high atmospheric texture in the sky. It looked like far-off haze or nearly-transparent cloud, and I straight up could not see it when the sky was fiercely blue. As the sun set further and further, the square of sky in the center stopped looking like a field beyond the frame and started to look like a plane of solid material. To me, it seemed like a piece of slate or black stone fixed on the inside of the gazebo roof. It's really, really strange and interesting!!
There's also the fact that the sky itself is changing color during this period. The constant color morphing makes it really hard to trust your own color perception, and you end up interrogating the color of the sky itself. "What color is the sky in your world" type shit, for real.
Nevertheless, while watching it, I did feel the desire to photograph it a couple times. However I only had my phone, which changes the color of the sky all the damn time on purpose, much to my chagrin... and a shitty digicam which I keep on hand precisely for its ability to create color-warped imagery. So the images I got are not at all trustworthy. Here's a couple of them. There's no better way to start distrusting your phone than to photograph a Turrell exhibit, though, so please know that I share them as part of a kind of grim dialogue with myself and with the art exhibit!! Hee hee hee!!!
Here's a corner of the Skyspace in the mid afternoon:
Near the start of the light show:
From later on:
The end:
Here's my shitty digicam struggling to depict some of the colors in this show:
While watching this show, my husband and I remarked to one another that the show was "Big Walk-core." It really is. Big Walk Turrell DLC when????
One of the odder things about this experience was that it actually taught a member of my group about the fact that smartphone cameras heavily alter colors. They tried to take a photo of the purple color field and were shocked to see their phone heavily modifying the hue of both the sky and the frame. They then became completely engrossed by this and spent the entire show photographing the artwork about once every thirty seconds as it changed hue.
I personally would not suggest enjoying the show this way, but I don't begrudge them this experience! If you've never before realized how profoundly your smartphone changes your photos, then there's no better way to learn than by repeatedly photographing two planes of color as they fluctuate for 30-40 minutes. I think Turrell might approve of someone learning about this from his art.
Anyway, I loved this. You really should visit one of Turrell's structures if you live close to one. Luckily, there are a shit ton of them all over the world, including many in museums and public spaces. You can find a list on Wikipedia here.
Finally, if you want to see a professionally-photographed attempt to convey what Dividing the Light is "actually like," it's depicted in the first couple minutes of this old video from the Guggenheim about a Turrell exhibit they also ran in 2013: