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James Turrell

James Turrell Biography

Artist

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“I always wanted to make a light that looks like the light you see in your dream. Because the way that light infuses the dream, the way the atmosphere is colored, the way light rains off people with auras and things like that...We don't normally see light like that. But we all know it. So this is no unfamiliar territory - or not unfamiliar light. I like to have this kind of light that reminds us of this other place we know.”

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“In thinking of light, if we can think about what it can do, and what it is, by thinking about itself, not about what we wanted it to do for other things, because again we've used light as people might be used, in the sense that we use it to light paintings. We use it to light so that we can read. We don't really pay much attention to the light itself. And so turning that and letting light and sound speak for itself is that you figure out these different relationships and rules.”

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“The Meeting is actually like the Gunpowder Meeting, or some of the earlier American Quaker MeetingsThe long house form is something that was traditionthat's what I started with as an idea. But then making this in terms of the sizing and the use that was asked for by Live Oak Meeting- I mean it's a very traditional form, except it's convertible. The top opens, and it makes a sky space where sky is really brought down to you; your awareness of it is made quite different. It was a little bit of a novel idea, that it's a roof that opens.”

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