In the beginning of the video, Irwin lost me a bit while talking about color and light. He talked about white and black as primary and secondary colors in light. Black and White are better understood as achromatic values, as they lack hue. The most interesting part of this artwork to me was how Irwin formed a somewhat cohesive diagram of color mixing via reflection in a setting of immersion. As subtractive primaries, Red, Yellow and Blue are the essentially the first and simplest harmony, commonly used at full chromatic glory in educational or playful contexts to indicate childhood and vitality. It’s always a treat to see the diffusion of that lively playfulness into the gallery space.

Although I do see an illustrative logic of this artwork, I wonder how the lighting/purity of light situation is handled, especially considering all the open doors and windows. I think it could have been pushed further in it’s simplification of complexity, perhaps incorporating the 3 dimensions of color into 3 dimensional space. Or a moving form with an archetypal local color, to describe the relative changes in hue throughout such a physical landscape of reflected light. Or at least let the crowd walk on top of the piece (did he?). Actually, I think I would rather experience those than the work by itself, although I’d probably be impressed with the size of it all for a while.

Conceptually, I appreciate his views on context and scope, although I find them to be limited. His contextual decisions seem to be based on physical visual elements like scale or value without considering more fluid or dynamic possibilities.