Ocula Conversation Thao Nguyen Phan: Dangerous Optimism Tessa Moldan, Brussels With Monsoon Melody on view at WIELS, Brussels, her largest solo exhibition to date, Thao Nguyen Phan discusses her transition to film to explore colonial legacies and ecological destruction in Vietnam.
Ocula Report Frieze Los Angeles: Shows to See Tessa Moldan, Los Angeles Los Angeles' art scene has a lot to offer during Frieze Los Angeles, with galleries, non-profits, and museums gearing up for the fair's second edition between 14 and 17 February 2020. In this Ocula Lowdown, Tessa Moldan lists a selection of the city's must-see shows.
Ocula Insight Jaki Irvine's Manifesto on Life at Kerlin Gallery, Dublin Apoorva Rajagopal, Dublin Ack Ro' , Jaki Irvine's reflection on the fragility of life at Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, is an 'ambitious, holistic installation' staged like a 'wild disarray of interconnected yet fragmented pieces'.
James Turrell was born in Los Angeles in 1943. His undergraduate studies at Pomona College focused on psychology and mathematics; only later, in graduate school, did he pursue art, receiving an MFA from the Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, California. Turrell's work involves explorations in light and space that speak to viewers without words, impacting the eye, body, and mind with the force of a spiritual awakening.
Read More'I want to create an atmosphere that can be consciously plumbed with seeing,' says the artist,
'like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire.'
Informed by his studies in perceptual psychology and optical illusions, Turrell's work allows us to see ourselves 'seeing.' Whether harnessing the light at sunset or transforming the glow of a television set into a fluctuating portal, Turrell's art places viewers in a realm of pure experience.
Situated near the Grand Canyon and Arizona's Painted Desert is Roden Crater, an extinct volcano the artist has been transforming into a celestial observatory for the past thirty years. Working with cosmological phenomena that have interested man since the dawn of civilisation and have prompted responses such as Stonehenge and the Mayan calendar, Turrell's crater brings the heavens down to earth, linking the actions of people with the movements of planets and distant galaxies. His fascination with the phenomena of light is ultimately connected to a very personal, inward search for mankind's place in the universe. Influenced by his Quaker faith, which he characterises as having a 'straightforward, strict presentation of the sublime,' Turrell's art prompts greater self-awareness through a similar discipline of silent contemplation, patience, and meditation. His ethereal installations enlist the common properties of light to communicate feelings of transcendence and the divine.
Turrell's work is represented in numerous public collections including the Tate Modern, London; the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and Hansol Museum, Wonju, Verese (Italy) Panza Foundation.
Ocula Conversation Almine Rech-Picasso Goes Global Sam Gaskin, Shanghai French gallerist Almine Rech-Picasso opened her first space in Asia on Shanghai 's historic Bund in July this year, bringing her eponymous gallery's total locations to five. The Shanghai gallery occupies roughly 4,000 square feet on the second floor of the three-storey Amber Building, a beautiful warehouse space, originally occupied by the...
Ocula Report Berlin, Boners and Brecht Diana d'Arenberg, Berlin Apparently my timing sucks. One week too late for Berlin Gallery Weekend, and one month too early for the Berlin Biennale. ‘You should have been here last weekend for Berlin Gallery Weekend!’ a Berliner friend exclaimed. ‘Everyone was having orgies at Soho House! It was the best art world networking!’ I shifted...
Related Press GOMA Finally Switches On its Massive James Turrell Light Installation 14 July 2018, Broadsheet The long-awaited James Turrell light installation has finally launched at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art. The gallery threw the switch on the Night Life 2018 last night. It will now illuminate the eastern and southern façades of GOMA every evening, with shifting patterns of coloured light from sunset to midnight.
Related Press MASS MoCA: It’s a Site for All Eyes 15 June 2017, The New York Times MASS MoCA, the vast, multibuilding museum of contemporary art here, is a weird and wonderful place. For one, the dominance of brick walls, wood floors, big windows and frequent columns of its repurposed 19th-century factory buildings is the apotheosis of SoHo, whose small-industry loft spaces were taken over by commercial art galleries in the...
Related Press A Journey Through James Turrell’s Disorienting World at the Newly Expanded MASS MoCA 14 June 2017, Hyperallergic Light can be bright and dull, clear and murky, or velvety and abrasive. In James Turrell's Perfectly Clear (1991), the viewer is subjected to an electromagnetic storm, a cascade of colors: rose, magenta, turquoise. Here, the medium is light, or, rather, the human optical-neurological apparatus that apprehends light. After putting on shoe covers,...
Related Press A Museum Where Giant Art Has Room to Breathe 26 May 2017, The New York Times The master plan for MASS MoCA in 1986 was a wildly ambitious dream: to simultaneously rehabilitate all 28 buildings of a shuttered 19th-century factory in this depressed Berkshire County town for the long-term display of monumental art installations.
Related Video & Audio James Turrell: Gathered Sky 9 December 2014, NOWNESS / 23 September 2014 An introspective James Turrell invites you to surrender under the immateriality of light with "Gathered Sky," a spellbinding permanent installation in Beijing's Temple Hotel. Three decades after turning the Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in Arizona, into a celestial work of art that was recently exhibited at the Guggenheim and Los...
