My work is about your seeing. There is a rich tradition in painting of work about light, but it is not light - it is the record of seeing. My material is light, and it is responsive to your seeing. — James Turrell
Season 1 artist James Turrell currently has a light installation on view at Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY through the end of the year. The work is entitled Gap, from the “Tiny Town series,” which he created between 2001-2006. The museum acquired the piece in 2005.
Turrell appeared on the art scene in the mid-1960s as part of the California light and space movement - an off-shoot of minimalism that took the literal and experimental nature of this New York movement in a different direction by focusing on visual perception itself.
In his work, Turrell isolates a central component of everyday experience—light. His installations grow out of a radically simple goal—to let the viewer experience light as directly as possible. In indoor installations such as Gap, he lets light take on its own otherworldly quality, creating a contemplative space where one experiences a single plane of illuminated color.
As viewers are forced to pay close attention to their own perceptions, their sense of reality is challenged, and the resulting instability generates a daydream experience.
Watch clips from James Turrell’s Art:21 segment and read extended interviews from the PBS series on his webpage here: http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/turrell/index.html
Travels of William Bartram—Reconsidered examines the history and culture of 18th-century American naturalists, John and his son William Bartram. Using their travel journals, drawings, and maps, Season 4 artist Mark Dion is retracing the journey of William Bartram, in particular, to northern Florida. Like Bartram, he is collecting things both natural and unnatural, making drawings and paintings of them, examining them, and mailing them back to Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia. The treasures that Dion finds will be installed in cabinets in the historic home of John Bartram next year.
Dion’s journey started with a send-off from Bartram’s in mid-November in Philadelphia. His travels can be followed online here, featuring monthly video chats, video of daily travels, city stops, photo galleries, audio, Mark’s handwritten journals, drawings and maps that pinpoint where he is.
The exhibition Mark Dion: Travels of William Bartram—Reconsidered will open June 20, 2008 at Bartram’s Garden.
For more information on the project, visit its website at http://www.markdionsbartramstravels.com. See more photos on the project’s Flickr site here.
Major exhibitions of work by Richard Serra (Season 1), Vija Celmins, Martin Puryear, and Kara Walker (all Season 2) all made it onto TIME Magazine’s annual Top 10 Exhibitions list.
Serra’s seminal retrospective at MoMA clocked in at number 1, a show that, according to TIME, was the “artworld thriller of the year.” Vija Celmins’ drawings show at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (#3 out of 10), garnered similar hyperbole, as did Puryear’s current retrospective at MoMA (#5; TIME’s art and architecture critic/blogger Richard Lacayo proclaims Puryear “one of the greatest living American artists”). Walker rounds out the Art21-related roster at #6, her current Whitney retrospective described as “a fearless combination of righteous anger, ruthless clarity and fierce imagination.”
Read the full details here.