James Turrell Research

James Turrell

"James Turrell is an American visual artist who makes enclosures designed to control and reimagine the viewers experience of light. Turrell started working with light in 1966 in his Santa Monica studio around the same time that  Los Angeles based artists Robert Irwin and Doug Wheeler, the self titled Light and Space group, were also rising in the art world. His work focuses on how we see and experience light and color and  he has been the recipient of many awards and exhibitions such as the MacArthur Genius Fellowship, inclusion in the profound PBS documentary Art:21, has a current exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York as well as being the subject of a recent retrospective at LACMA." (Source: http://blog.colourstudio.com/2013/07/color-icon-james-turrell.html)

 “My work is more about your seeing than it is about my seeing, although it is a product of my seeing. I’m also interested in the sense of presence of space; that is space where you feel a presence, almost an entity — that physical feeling and power that space can give.”

(Jamesturrell.com)

The work of Turrell's that stands out to me most from researching his works is the ganzfield series. The way in which it uses colour to challenge perceptions and to create an immersive experience for the audience may be something that we could experiment with as a group.

“Ganzfeld”: a German word to describe the phenomenon of the total loss of depth perception as in the experience of a white-out. http://jamesturrell.com/work/type/ganzfeld/