James Turrell At Mass MoCA

James Turrell’s “Hind Sight” (1984), at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMoCA), North Adams, MA:

“the viewer proceeds through a corridor into a dark chamber devoid of visual or aural stimuli (apart from the exhalations of an air duct). The experience is similar to falling asleep, as physical reality recedes from consciousness and the viewer enters a meditative state. After 10 to 15 minutes, the viewer’s pupils are fully dilated, at which point the viewer is called back to the material world by the presence of a dim light on the opposite side of the chamber, so faint that it can only be perceived in the viewer’s peripheral vision.”

Having previously experienced Turrell’s “Perfectly Clear” at the Museum, which projects a sense that one is floating in a boundless visual void, one recognizes Turrell’s proposal that he does not make art using light but rather by challenging the human eye and perception to recognize not what we see but how we see....
-Anthony Napoli