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 james turrell
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.A lighting technician’s dream at London’s Albion Gallery. Walking into the Albion Gallery, part of a new Norman Foster complex, is a little like being in an architect’s model. Identical lined-up trees and vast empty spaces create an air of anonymity. Turrell’s clean and apparently emotionless work, though, is exactly the type of art that an architect might approve of inhabiting such a model. On show is a selection of Turrell’s early light works from the 60s. Rectangles and triangles of coloured light are projected into the corners and onto the walls of a maze of rooms. And, along with a few geometrical aquatint studies of his installations from 1989-90, that’s it. Simple. But although the pieces are minimal in their ingredients, they’re more controlled explosions of colour than just shapes on walls. Often spanning corners so that rectangles become cuboid, they come out towards you. Look for long enough and they seem increasingly ethereal, as though they might actually be portals to a parallel world. Look away and this world’s tainted with shades of green, your eyes having adjusted to the colour. So, beneath the cold, cerebral surface there’s something more human at the heart of his work - an exploration of our experience of the world around us. Turrell (most recently famed for creating the Roden Crater Millennium art project in his native California) is defined as an artist by an interest in light and space, and how those things directly affect us and our own self-awareness. Although he follows in strong artistic traditions with these interests, back then he was approaching them in a new way. Before the world and their dog started making installations and showing video projections, he was handmaking his own light projectors, so hard were they to come by. A lighting technician’s dream they may be, but Turrell’s subtle explorations of experience are still a sight for sore eyes. James Turrell - Projection Works 1967-69 is at the Albion Gallery, London, until 16 December 04.
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