James Turrell

Turrell, who holds a degree in perceptual psychology, has created a number of works that he calls Ganzfelds, using curved corners and walls in combination with colored light to shape viewers' understanding of space and depth.

Ganzfeld is a German word referring to the loss of depth perception that arises when experiencing a lack of aural and visual stimulation, as in a whiteout.

For MASS MoCA, Turrell has installed his largest Ganzfeld by volume to date, titled Perfectly Clear — a two-story installation that viewers are able to enter, becoming immersed in the work.

In Turrell's Shallow Spaces, the artist manipulates edges and flat surfaces with cast light, inventing apparent spaces of almost infitite perceptual depth.

The artist is a master at conflating space with light, compressing light-filled volumes into what at first eppeart to be planar shapes.

His Wedgeworks use light to create the illusion of a solid wall or scrim-like barriers — again achieved solely through light and architecture.

Here, a mesmerizing sequence of colors and shapes floating cloud-like on a curved, scrim-like surface, slowly, almost imperceptibly merge and fold into one another.

In one of Turrell's earliest works on view at MASS MoCA, a glowing white cube seems to float in the corner of the room, generated by the light of a precisely placed projector.