Jenny Holzer Jenny Holzer's installation at MASS MoCA includes tables of actual human bones and screenprints of declassified American military documents recording prisoner abuse. They feel psychedelic and transcendental, like stunning sunsets or sacred temples or the awesomeness of the cosmos. Turrell’s spaces radiate mysterious force and power, vast and serene but also at times unsettling. Sometimes it feels like wall, sometimes it nearly disappears, sometimes it feels like a portal into another dimension. The end wall seems to be cut out in a rectangular shape with round corners. The most spectacular artwork here is one of Turrell’s ganzfeld installations, a curious room (like the one pictured above) you can walk into that feels like something out of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” All details and corners that might orient us have been eliminated, except for the entrance portal, so it feels as if you’re walking into … a fog of brilliant color, cycling through blue to vermilion to magenta to overcast white, like dawn experienced from an airplane up among the clouds. The magic is created by the fine wedge edge of the window, which makes it seem to disappear, and the curved walls of the room beyond, which eliminate the corners that usually help us get our bearings. Which in fact is a window into a small room illuminated by colored lights. Try to touch them and your hand goes right through the shape. At first they appear flat, but as you walk closer they feel … strange. In some installations here from the 1970s, you walk into find rectangles or diamond shapes on walls. Featuring a retrospective of designs dating back to 1967, on view here as part of a 25-year partnership, this is a rare occasion where “mind-blowing” is actually not hype. But it remains rare to find Turrell’s art east of the Rocky Mountains.Īnother aspect that helps make Building 6 a new art pilgrimage destination is that nine rooms have been meticulously constructed for Turrell’s signature mind-blowing mirages. He was part of what’s called the Light and Space movement, a group of artists who altered exhibition spaces to create works operating at the very edges of our senses of perception. Turrell, who now splits his time between Maryland and Arizona, is one of the most astonishing and important artists to emerge from Los Angeles in the 1960s. “Imagine closing your eyes, but instead of seeing blackness, you’re washed with color space,” MASS MoCA director Joseph Thompson says in a valiant attempt to describe one of James Turrell’s wondrous light installations. To help you find your way, below is our guide to Building 6’s highlights: James Turrell One of James Turrell's ganzfeld rooms. To get a sense of the scale of the undertaking, one of the first things you see when you enter Building 6 is an eye-popping mural by Boston artist Joe Wardwell that’s 140 feet long - about the size of a 14-story building laid on its side.īuilding 6’s triangular footprint, nestled at the confluence of the north and south branches of the Hoosic River, has been given over to new, large, long-term exhibitions of transcendental light installations, eccentric instruments visitors can play, bracing ruminations on America’s recent wars, and immersive virtual reality experiences by names including James Turrell, Laurie Anderson, Jenny Holzer, Gunnar Schonbeck, Robert Rauschenberg and Louise Bourgeois. Now with the debut of its Building 6 on Sunday, May 28, MASS MoCA adds 130,000 more square feet of space, nearly doubling its already enormous room for exhibitions - one of the largest in the country. The museum has expanded as it slowly redeveloped the 16-acre, 26-building site. Since the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) opened in the old Sprague Electric factory in North Adams in 1999, it’s become known for its vast industrial spaces that it fills with monumental art. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR) This article is more than 5 years old. Part of Boston artist Joe Wardwell's "Hello America: 40 Hits From the 50 States" installed at MASS MoCA.
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