James Turrell was born into a Quaker family in Los Angeles. His father, an engineer and pilot who was also a birdcall expert, made a special room with windows in the roof of their house from which to call and listen to birds. The young Turrell made holes in the blackout curtains and pretended that the patterns of light coming through were constellations. Although Turrell was nine when his father died, his interest in astronomy and aeronautics reflect his father’s influence. His mother, an especially devout Quaker and medical doctor who worked in the Peace Corps, was also a dynamic figure in Turrell’s life. Turrell’s material choice and use of minimal forms reflect the influence of his Quaker upbringing, which emphasized simplicity and the “inner light” inside each person. In 1965, Turrell graduated with a degree in perceptual psychology before attending graduate school to study art. In 1966, he first began experimenting with artificial and natural light in a Santa Monica studio where he created and exhibited his installations until the mid-1970s. Throughout his artistic career Turrell has focused on light and perception. His most ambitious project is the transformation of an extinct volcano, Roden Crater, into a structure for viewing the sky and the shifting of light. Still under construction, Turrell has been creating this work of art since the 1970s.
The perception of light is central to The Light Inside. An installation piece that the visitor experiences by walking through it, The Light Inside is set inside an underground tunnel that connects two buildings of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: the Caroline Wiess Law Building and the Audrey Jones Beck Building. Concealed sources of neon light periodically change between magenta, cobalt blue, and crimson. Large opaque glass walls at either end of the tunnel entrances both complement, contain, and filter the projected light within the space. Painted with highly reflective white paint, the ceiling, walls, and lowered area on either side of the raised black walkway captures and transmits the light, creating the illusion of boundless illuminated space.
The Light Inside is an expanded version of an earlier series Turrell calls Shallow Space Constructions, in which the walls of a semiclosed tunnel become vessels for conducting light. Turrell’s art is unique because the essence of his work is seemingly intangible; it is neither paint nor sculpture, yet it is experienced physically as a concrete form. Visitors in Turrell’s tunnel can often be seen reaching out to touch the light. The size of the tunnel is difficult to determine because of the distortion of space caused by the light. This distortion allows visitors to have their own unique perceptual experiences. Turrell explains, “When you are presented or confronted with a work of mine, it is something for your seeing and about your seeing, not about mine.”
Turrell’s work defies the common boundaries applied to works of art such as painting and sculpture, but is connected to the work of other artists. Turrell shares an interest in capturing light. As a graduate student, Turrell was also influenced by the works of Georges Seurat (French, 1859–1891) and Mark Rothko (American, 1903–1970). Seurat, a Pointillist painter, created paintings using small dots of color that, from a distance, appear to blend together and make a cohesive picture. Like Seurat, Turrell’s work places emphasis on the viewer’s perception and optical effects. Mark Rothko’s Abstract Expressionist paintings are large color fields that suggest luminosity. Turrell’s use of light in rectangular spaces and shapes, the monumental size of his pieces, as well as their lack of representational subject matter, are reminiscent of Rothko’s classic style.
