Take your Time
Staging Take your time is a coup for Australia, the only venue outside America where this exhibition, by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, will travel. Organised by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and curated by Madeleine Grynsztejn, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the exhibition spans fifteen years of Eliasson’s multi-disciplinary practice. It is expansive and expensive—the most costly exhibit to date presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA)—but it also delivers.
Eliasson’s immersive environments titillate our senses from the outset. He has chosen a work often used to preface his exhibitions, Room for one colour (1997), to lead us into this show. It is an alert reading in the Australian context, the installation’s intense yellow light and spatial void speaks to our national psyche and landscape tradition. Comprising seven rows of ceiling-mounted mono-frequency yellow bulbs, their piercing glow physically unsettles the viewer. We think of light as being intangible but Eliasson reminds us it is physically felt. The longer you stay in the space, the more the initial prick to the retina softens to the warmth of the hue. It is upon exiting the gallery, however, that one’s expectation is thrown, as the museum’s pristine white cube is turned into a purple haze. It is a hell of an entrée to Eliasson’s work.
Room for one colour is juxtaposed with a playful installation, and in tandem these works pose the synthesis of Eliasson’s practice. Comprised of three tonnes of white LEGO blocks that viewers are invited to sit down and re/construct, this second work, like Eliasson’s yellow room, prepares the audience for their role of engagement. On loan from the Queensland Art Gallery, The cubic