Oculus visits the James Turrell Retrospective at LACMA
“Sir—keep away 4 feet from the art!” What do a bunch of lighting designers do when they see lighting art? Get in trouble of course.
The Turrell Retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a very impressive way to experience light. Even as lighting designers used to working with a variety of lighting design projects over the years, some of us who visited the show were pretty amazed by the variety of unusual perceptual illusions created in the installations. And of course the urge to dissect the installation is always there—so in addition to legitimately poring over the details in Turrell’s displayed notebooks, we could not resist sneaking behind the magic curtain too, only to be quickly reprimanded by the guards.
In addition to experiencing the light installations first hand, the reason for the visit was also to celebrate Geman’s one year anniversary and the hard work of our two summer interns, Zach Clawson (from the University of Colorado, Boulder) and Hyun Jung (from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles).
Light is a challenging medium to work in mostly due to its immateriality and ethereal quality so we were really impressed with the very real physical presence the light had in several of the installations. Definitely worth checking out!
