James Turrell: Blue Pesher

Blue Pesher is one of James Turrell's early Skyspaces, a specifically proportioned chamber with an aperture in the ceiling, open to the sky. This type of work, unique to the artist's practice, can be an autonomous structure or integrated into existing architecture. For Cheekwood, Turrell created a circular building tucked into the hillside. The entrance, behind steel doors, gives the work an appearance of an old mineshaft or concrete bunker, betraying little of what awaits inside. After traversing a forty-five-foot-long tunnel, a cylindrical room bounded by high-backed benches is punctuated by an oculus, some ten feet in diameter above, and a shallow pit filled with black sand below. These two round elements create a striking visual contrast between light and dark and is a defining feature of the work. The title of Blue Pesher references the Hebrew word "pesher," meaning interpretation. Turrell has compared Skyspaces to the Quaker meetinghouses he attended as a child, "where you go inside to greet the light," but states that they are about "the juncture of the interior space and the space outside by bringing the space of the sky down to the plane of the ceiling." Blue Pesher is best experienced at sunset, when the lighting embedded within its interior begins a 40-minute program of shifting colored light which interacts with and affects the changing light of the sky outside. Blue Pesher is located on the Ann & Monroe Carell Jr. Family Sculpture Trail, accessible by way of the Susan & Luke Simons Blue Pesher Promenade.