JAMES TURRELL (b. 1943) is a contemporary American artist. His works often rely on a shift between what you originally see and what you begin to piece together. In his work, “A Frontal Passage” Turrell provokes in his viewer pure sensory displacement, confusion and disorientation. I encountered the work in the opening exhibition of the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). It was a dark room which seemed to have a well-lit red rectangle hanging on the back wall; as you approached the piece it revealed itself to be a hollow space, an entire room behind a cutout on the wall and a bright red light piercing through. The experience was purely aesthetic, and also intimate as the perceptual shift that occurred was quiet and personal to each viewer.
The concept of Ostranenie, originally used by the Russian critic Viktor Shklovskii as a term for literary analysis, means to make the commonplace strange, the familiar alien. In his gentle and yet invasive gesture, Turrell achieves just that.
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