Thursday, February 25, 2010

"Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson" @ Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

Art is always inseparable from the context - both external and, particularly, internal - in which it is experienced, and even at the time, I felt that this rather excellent exhibition of Eliasson's immersive explorations of colour, light and shadow was affecting me in a way heavily influenced by the odd state of mind in which I wandered through it; attempting to fully describe that state of mind would (were such a thing possible in the first place, natch) violate the 'no personal excursions' injunction that theoretically holds for extemporanea more violently than I'd like, so suffice to say that it was bittersweet...I felt light, slightly unmoored from everything.

The work which was most deeply coloured by that state of mind was "Beauty", at the very end of the exhibition - a dark room in which shimmers a rainbow generated by the refraction of light (from a suspended spotlight) through a fine spray of mist, changing in appearance as the viewer walks around, towards or away from it. It's a stunning piece, and reflects many of Eliasson's preoccupations and techniques - most notably, a recurring concern with interstitial spaces between those three key components of his art, colour, light and shadow.



The exhibition itself is deliberately put together as a journey, and that's how it feels; "Beauty" is an apt end-point, and "Room for one colour" (the colour is yellow) an equally appropriate beginning. In between, a sensuous (in the truest sense) sequence of often literally kaleidoscopic installations, most of them walk-throughs, whose titles really tell the tale - "360 degree room for all colours", "One-way colour tunnel", "Multiple grotto", "Soil quasi bricks" - broken up by a room with four sets of elegant, vaguely serialist photographs (one, "The horizon series", was the set that first brought Eliasson to my attention, when I saw it as part of the Guggenheim exhibition a while back) and, adjoining it, another containing a bunch of models and prototypes with large colour spectrum wheels on posters all around on the walls...whatever else was going on in my head at the time, this was really good.