James Turrell's 'As Seen Below' Skyspace Installation
James Turrell's newest installation, and his 100th Skyspace, sinks guests into a darkened corridor before opening into a domed chamber 130 feet across and 52 feet tall, with a single 20-foot oculus cut into the apex as the room's only light source. It's the largest Skyspace Turrell has built inside a museum, this one at Denmark's ARoS Aarhus Art Museum. Turrell's influence reaches well past museum walls: Drake based the visual treatment of his "Hotline Bling" video on Turrell's Breathing Light installation at LACMA, and Turrell later said he was flattered, though he'd had nothing to do with the video. The new work runs in three distinct modes: Open Sky, with the aperture left bare during regular museum hours; Colour Shift, when the opening seals and the chamber cycles through Turrell's programmed lighting on the half hour; and Twilight, a separately bookable sunrise or sunset session where the dome's interior hues track the changing sky, useful in Aarhus, where summer sunsets run past 10:30 p.m. The dome took roughly a decade to build, slowed by inflation, pandemic delays, and a contractor bankruptcy before opening this month, timed to the summer solstice.
