After looking up this artist’s work, it was hard to pick just two of them that seemed interesting to talk about. He has a great body of work that deals with light, space, the natural world, and perception of these things, and many of his installation pieces are examples of very inviting, integrating pieces that asks the viewer to think about themselves in relation to the space they’re in and how they make a difference in it. In lectures and interviews he talks about how experiences are things that connects individuality to community, and I think this is reflected in his work because he’s trying to give people an accessible experience. As a result, even though is work engages a lot of different senses and often deals with the atmosphere of the environment, it visually still feels sort of clean and classical and appealing to a large audience (who may not even be into art) in the way that beautifully designed things are.
Anyhow, so a lot of his installations look really amazing and seem like an awesome experience, and there’s a lot there that I’d love to see for myself, but I picked out a couple things that are smaller scale–one of which doesn’t seem very successful to me–because it seemed like these were still interesting explorations that make his other pieces better.
The first is from 2005, which was the one I thought seemed a bit boring in comparison to his other works:
Your Invisible House. It plays a bit with light and perception in that it deals with a lot of mirrors and probably some illusion, with parts reflecting other parts, but in terms of really giving a viewer an experience, it seems really direct and simply visual, rather than really asking a person to become part of it.
Homage to P. Schatz from 2012 is similar to the one mentioned above., in that it’s also mostly a visual piece, but I think the movement and interplay of light over (or through?) the surface of the piece at least really draws a person in to watch it change. I mostly bring it up, though, because in class we discussed how optical illusion type exercises aren’t archived in museums anymore. But people are obviously still fascinated with that kind of thing and Eliasson seems to have expanded on that a lot, considering how he uses mirrors and light in a lot of his work.
In fact The Weather Project wouldn’t be complete if he weren’t using optical illusions to help it along, since the part that makes up the “sun” is actually a half-circle that looks like a full one thanks to the mirror on the ceiling. His horizon projects, too, wouldn’t be complete without the optical illusion of perspective that happens when a horizon-line is introduced to a space.