Chasing Light
James Turrell, Raemar pink white, 1969. Shallow space construction: fluorescent light, 440 x 1070 x 300 cm, Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles, California.
Light has long been chased by visual artists. Seeking to represent its myriad effects on volume, form and space, light is the elusive poem that illuminates the tenderness of an outstretched hand, the warm enveloping glow of atmosphere, the harsh glare of exposure. Light is chased across disciplines, as when a sculptor chisels stone away and light enters, when a painter brushes mists of chiaroscuro to deepen distance, or when splinters of light are carved and chipped from a woodblock bringing shards of light into the darkness of ink. Quite apart from representing light however is light art, in which the element of light is everywhere: light is the medium, sometimes the object, often even the self-reflective subject of the work. The lines are blurred in light art where light is the phenomenon, the medium and the technology, all at once. This blurring was evident in the Vivid festival in Sydney recently, which celebrated the architectural spaces of the city by night through a series of visually stunning and technically proficient light displays by a number of contemporary light artists. In seeking to nominate the few most influential light artists of today though, the work of James Turrell comes to mind immediately. Turrell’s light art is based in phenomenology and the mystery of perception. His installations offer an intense and often personal encounter with what seems to be a rarefied and purified form of light, enhanced by the viewing (or experiential) space. Every aspect of these spaces, whether an open-sky observatory, like the permanently installed skyspace Within