Presentation given Sept. 15, 2003 - Santa Rosa Junior College - Newman Auditorium

We are here on the occasion of James Turrell's: Light and Land exhibition at the Sonoma County Museum. Already in this moment we are actively engaged with the art of James Turrell. And we need only to maintain our attention and to keep our eyes open in order to sustain the aesthetic experience.

I would be hard pressed to give you an adequate background into the work of James Turrell in the time available. I would be hard pressed no matter the amount of time I was allotted as the work of James Turrell extends throughout time and beyond space. It exists in dream time or in a time without limits… extending back in time through celestial events easily 8 billion years distant and up through the human kind of time or the time we mark and notate and then beyond into the future, beyond our current understanding and technologies.

James Turrell created his first light work at the age of 6, punching out the constellations through the blackout curtains of the room his father built to call and to feed the birds. His interest in light continued and an interest in flight developed and at the age of 16, when most of us would be struggling with drivers education, James acquired his pilots license and took to the skies. As a college student at Pomona College he studied mathematics and perceptual psychology, further evidence of his preoccupation with visual perception. His studies in perceptual psychology led to an interest in art and in 1966, he leased the Mendota Hotel in Ocean Park California and converted it into a laboratory of light. Each room was transformed into an experiment into the substantiation of light as an artistic medium.

Shallow Space, Cross Corner Projections, Wedgework, Structurual Cuts, Skyspace, Gansfeld, Dark Spaces - experiments, investigations, installations revealing light as not merely the source of illumination but the central substance of our experience. Beginning with Autonomous Structures and Perceptual Cells the focus shifts from the object of light to the processes that are the human experience of perception. In these installations, he addresses the viewer, the participant and unseats them from the comforts of a preconceived, constructed reality and through immersion forces a re evaluation, a renovation of the basic structure underlying the perceptual experience.

Roden Crater - from 1979 through to the present James has been diligently toiling away in the desert just outside Flagstaff, Arizona. Roden Crater a 400,000 year old volcano on the edge of the Painted Desert . His objective has been the creation of an art work beyond the artifice that is societal culture and politics. Creating a work that is absorbed by nature and embraced by geodesic time. A net, a container for the collection of light forms projected out by the cosmos across time and space, celestial observatories like clock works in alignment with lunar events thousands of years coming.

I invite and encourage you to engage and investigate this artist and the ideas he promotes through his installations, his writing, his music, his crater. There is much here to be gained not merely with regards to this artist and his experience but also with regards to your own art and your own experience.