"I put you in a situation where you feel the physicality of light. This is an art that people try to touch - but there’s nothing there to touch. There is, in fact, no object; there is no image, nor any place of focus. What are you then looking at? Well, I’m hoping that you then have the self-reflexive act of looking at your looking, so that you’re actually seeing yourself see to some degree, so that it actually does reveal something about your seeing as opposed to being a journal of my seeing."
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One of James Turrell’s latest works, Ganzfield, is an 10 x 12 x 10m room bathed in changing colour. Its name refers to the Ganzfield effect, a phenomenon of visual perception in which staring at an undifferentiated, uniform field of colour (a la Olafur Eliasson’s Room For One Colour) results in hallucinations.
In Turrell’s work, the room cycles between the red and blue ranges of the colour spectrum, which rapidly overwhelm the retina. In seconds, the boundaries of the space dissolve. The mind looks in vain for corners of walls and is left instead with an impression of infinity...
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