James Turrell Quotes
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Generally, we use light to illuminate other things. I like the thingness, the materiality of light itself. So it feels like it's occupying the space, making a plane, being something that was there, not just passing through. Because light is just passing through. I make these spaces that seem to arrest it for our perception.
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I feel my work is made for one being, one individual. You could say that's me, but that's not really true. It's for an idealized viewer.
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To some degree, to control light, I have to have a way to form it, so I use form almost like the stretcher bar of a canvas.
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I have high expectations of my audience, and in general, I would say they've met that.
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In a way, light unites the spiritual world and the ephemeral, physical world. People frequently talk about spiritual experiences using the vocabulary of light: Saul on the road to Damascus, near-death experiences, samadhi or the light-filled void of Buddhist enlightenment.
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It is only when light is reduced that the pupil opens and feeling goes out of the eyes like touch.
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I sell blue sky and coloured air.
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From the very beginning, I was very interested just in light, and art seemed to be a way to work with it.
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All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.
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It's possible to gather light that's older than our solar system.
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I am interested in relating the things we see with the things we see with our eyes closed.
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I'm working to bring celestial objects like the sun and moon into the spaces that we inhabit.
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Nowhere in the job description of an artist is the requirement that I must validate your taste.
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My desire is to bring astronomical events and objects down into your personal, lived-in space.
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Each day is a different length of time and that gives a different length to the cusp between light and darkness or darkness and light.
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I don't want you looking at the light fixture; I want you looking at where light goes. But more than that, I'm interested in the effect of light upon you and your perceptions.
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There is an idea, first of all, of vision fully formed with the eyes closed. Of course the vision we have in a lucid dream often has greater lucidity and clarity than vision with the eyes open.
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In age of consumerism and materialism, I traffic in blue sky and colored air.
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I feel that I want to use light as this wonderful and magic elixir that we drink as Vitamin D through the skin - and I mean, we are literally light-eaters - to then affect the way that we see.
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Color is just in a small area of our vision, and the rest we add with the mind.
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I live in the sky as a pilot, so it has great meaning to me.
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I like to use light as a material, but my medium is actually perception. I want you to sense yourself sensing - to see yourself seeing.
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It's difficult for people to visualize from my drawings what it's going to be, so I often find myself talking them into things that they go along with, and when they see what's been made, they are surprised.
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I haven't been that great at attending my own openings. Still, I'm learning to enjoy this a lot more than I used to.