This work continues James Turrell’s significant series of Ganzfelds, room-sized installations in which light itself—the very thing we see—is the object of the artwork. The term ganzfeld, literally translating from German as “complete field,” describes the phenomenon of perceptual overload.
Standing in one of these fields of color, visitors experience the sensation of drifting through a limitless, luminous void and being transported to the limits of their consciousness.
Turrell’s early training as a pilot, followed by academic studies in perceptual psychology, inform his longstanding fascination with recreating, through light and color, these phenomena which tend to occur naturally when looking at vast expanses like the sky or the horizon line. This real yet intangible boundary where sea and sky meet is evoked in the artwork’s title and finds deep resonance in a coastal location like Miami.
As blues of varying intensity give way to the peachy oranges of sunsets, the vibrant greens of palms and the hot pinks of neon signs, an abstracted and dematerialized landscape of the city’s striking hues unfolds around visitors.
James Turrell
Beginning his art career in the 1960s, James Turrell’s work is primarily an exploration of light and space. By making light the subject of the revelation, Turrell’s work challenges the very nature of how and what is perceived and, in particular, how what is perceived affects and forms the reality lived. One part meditative and another confounding, Turrell’s works heighten the viewer’s very sense of seeing and place the viewer in a realm of experience.
