Looking at Looking

I was fortunate to visit the new James Turrell Skyspace in Green Mountain Falls recently. Completed in June, it’s one of his newest works, and the only Skyspace to be on the side of a mountain. After camping nearby, we drove to the trailhead in the dark, parked, and began the 20ish minute hike to our 5:55am sunrise viewing.

Turrell has been making work about light and space for over 50 years. He has 78 Skyspaces in various places around the world. Some are at museums art art institutions or parks, others are in private residences. What unites them is that they’re all a room with a hole (some circular, some square) in the ceiling that frames the sky. What makes this hole or “aperture” special is that it has a razor sharp edge that removes all visual depth. So the effect is of a seamless shape of sky against a clean canvas of ceiling.

Some Skyspaces use ambient light. Some, like the one we visited, have special lighting inside the room that slowly changes color, spanning a wide spectrum of visible colors. 

As we lay there on the floor, gazing up at the aperture at the dark blue-black early morning sky, the room dimmed and was evenly lit with a soft pink. The pink light in the room slowly changed to purple, blue, green, yellow, and white, then started over and cycled through additional combinations of hue and saturation.

While the room changed color, so did the sky. Over the course of the hour long viewing, the color of the sky changed as much as the room itself, ranging from olive green, to soft pink, to dark gray, and a bunch of other colors that are not usually used to describe “sky”. The experience is nearly impossible to put into words.

I have always understood that our perception of color is highly variable. But this concept has never been so clearly demonstrated for me. The difference between what we “see” in the Skyspace and what we “know” is messy. Realizing that perception is not what we’ve always thought it to be is both unsettling and enlightening. 

It’s a powerful reminder that our eyes and our brains are not as reliable or precise as we may think. Which makes me curious about the other ways in which our minds are “deceiving” us. 

As Turrell says “My work is more about your seeing than it is about my seeing, although it is a product of my seeing. My work has no object, no image and no focus. With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking. What is important to me is to create an experience of wordless thought.”