Olafur Eliasson at the Jamie Residence

For a project titled "Meant To Be Lived In (Today I am Feeling Prismatic)," Olafur Eliasson transformed a modernist house, the Jamie Residence in the Pasadena hills, into an even more rarefied visual experience: a kind of auratic pavilion of light and color. This was the first in an international series of site-specific projects launched by Milan's Galleria Emi Fontana. The owner of the house, which is a cantilevered box designed in 2000 by the L.A. firm Escher GuneWardena, emptied the premises, allowing Eliasson to reconfigure the largely open-plan interior. Turning his back on the house's magnificent site and views, Eliasson blocked walls of glass with drywall painted black.

With black rubber flooring and black ceilings, the interior became a tabula rasa for 11 discrete installations and sculptures that created dazzling theatrical effects.

For Your Space Embracer (2004), a harsh beam of light was directed to shine through a dangling mirrored ring. As the ring turned, a halo of light traveled in a slow-motion promenade across walls and ceiling. Seeming to encompass the space, the circular light morphed into a rectilinear shape as it traversed the room's angular corner. A harsher light was engaged in Domestic Motions (2005). The beam was directed onto five rotating floor-to-ceiling glass prisms whose partially mirrored surfaces cast color-tinged stripes on opposite sides of a room. Rainbow bands of light danced across viewers' bodies and the walls behind them.

In Eye Ceiling (2005), Eliasson shone light up through a cylindrically shaped, color-effect filter to create a kind of overhead eyeball with a shimmering, dark purple iris. Installed in a corner, Spectral Projection (2005) featured a sharp light shining through a rotating, hanging group of four concentric, flattened, clear acrylic rings. Their reflections and shadows languorously played across a wall-length, dark, semi-transparent screen, creating intricate patterns that evoked a spacy laser light show.

The one work that utilized an exterior view--the aptly titled Kaleidoscope (2005)---outdid most magic acts. Projecting from a small window, a 6-foot-long mirrored box paradoxically offered both a distant view of downtown Pasadena and an immediate view of the street and hillside below the house. The spatial disconnect seemed impossible, and the mystery remained undiminished after it was explained to me that it relied on bounced peripheral, mirrored reflections. Enlisting the principles of physics and optics with dazzling aplomb, the German/Icelandic artist managed to outshine most recent examples of California Light and Space art in the movement's own backyard.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group