![]() ![]() ![]() With an antediluvian beard and folksy manner of speaking, Turrell plays the part of an artist-frontiersman, dedicating much of his time to “ Roden Crater,” a dormant volcano outside of Flagstaff, Arizona, that he is converting into a naked-eye observatory. “And, when the pupil is opened, touch comes out of the eyes, and you really can feel light … Some people have said, ‘For a person who claims to be a light artist, you use precious little of it.’” “When I first started out … I reduced the light levels of many of the pieces, because when light is reduced, then your pupil opens,” said Turrell last month at a gala in Boston, where he was presented with the Medal Award by the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts. James Turrell when accepting this year’s Medal Award by the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts (photo by Caitlin Cunningham, Tufts University) (This might be part of the reason that, as with previous Turrell exhibitions, photography is prohibited.) This exhibition, more than most, is designed for direct experience, not reproduction and dissemination via Instagram. The sacral charge of the destination was amplified by the difficulty of getting there. After a 130-mile journey, I entered a hushed space where other visitors were submerged in the protean matter - fuzzy, ethereal, soupy, psychedelic - emanating from Turrell’s light installations. The terminus of this pilgrimage was the former factory complex that has since been converted into one of the largest art museums in the world - last month, MASS MoCA doubled its exhibition space with the opening of Building 6, bringing its gallery footprint to some 250,000 square feet. To reach this light sanctuary at MASS MoCA from Boston, I drove along Route 2 across a landscape characterized by wild turkeys, purveyors of maple sweets and star-spangled bunting. The exhibition brings together light installations from every stage of the career of this 74-year-old artist and elder statesman of the Southern California Light and Space movement, from what appears to be a levitating cube (a projection of buttery light in the corner of the gallery) to a series of holographic images that seem to contain three-dimensional wisps of light. Installation view of James Turrell: Into the Light in Building 6 at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (© James Turrell, photo by Florian Holzherr)
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