Kara Walker is not a subtle artist.  Perhaps best known for her cut-paper silhouettes, she often uses violent images that brazenly call forth issues of race, gender and sexuality to the fore.

Creative Time has commissioned Walker to create Subtlety: Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the ­demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.  While intricate sugar confections used as centerpieces for feasts are apparently called subtleties, Walker's work is anything but.

Walker has created a magnificent sphinx-like sculpture that is more than 35 feet high and 75 feet long, and installed it in the derelict remains of the old Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg.  After years of community protest, the site has been recently approved by the City Council for developer, Two Trees, to demolish the factory and build a high-rise residential development.  Using this site for her temporary installation at this juncture in its history, Walker and her team used white sugar, donated by Domino, to cover the sphinx which is sculpted with styrofoam blocks.  She also created smaller boy figures made of molasses--and currently in various stages of melting--and installed them surrounding their snow-white mother figure.

The factory site reeks of its history, a raw syrupy smell of hardened molasses.  Entering the vacant cavernous space, Walker's sphinx lounges at the far end, bathed in the sunlight and surrounded by her dissolving attendants.  Her majestic presence evokes issues of the past and the present: the plantation economy of the antebellum south; relations between masters and slaves (particularly those between male plantation owners and female slaves); Brooklyn in the late 1880s when the Domino plant was said to have been the largest sugar refinery in the world; and gentrified "Wiliamsburg" (complete with scare quotes).  In Walker's first three-dimensional artwork, she manages to hit the sweet spot (pun somewhat intended) to achieve powerfully evocative imagery through contemplative serenity.

ART21 documents the installation in-process here:

Walker's work is on view at the Domino Sugar Refinery until July 6, 2014.  Catch it before her work and the refinery are removed.

James Turrell: A Retrospective at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is an expansive show featuring works by James Turrell from over five decades.  Using a variety of techniques, Turrell has attempted to elucidate the "seeing that occurs within"; in creating an environment where reality collaborates with the visitor's subjective perception, what Turrell refers to as the "thing-ness of light…itself becomes a revelation."  LACMA's show spans light projections (such as Cross Corner Projections where Turrell projects light onto corners creating the semblance of objects, Space Division Constructions where light creates a sense of surface across an actual opening, and Wedgeworks that use architecture to frame light), prints, drawings and models of his Roden Crater project, holograms, as well as immersive environments.  I had the wonderful opportunity to experience three immersive environments (Light Reignfall, Dark Matters and Breathing Light)--each contemplative, revelatory and mind-blowing in their own ways.

Light Reignfall (2011) is essentially akin to an Aten Reign (2013) on fast forward for one.  Not for claustrophobes, the work is from the Perceptual Cell series, which are enclosed structures that provide single-viewer experiences.  From the outside, the structure looks like a globular MRI apparatus.  A white lab-coated attendant asked me to choose between a "hard" or "soft" program (I chose the former), and handed me a very detailed (but extremely comprehensive and well-written!) waiver to sign.  Having taken my shoes and spectacles off, and given a "panic" button lanyard and headphones, I was slid into the chamber.  In the next 12 minutes, a light program enfolded before my eyes, while a constant noise emanated through the headphones.  I initially panicked, as I perceived the intensely hued blankets of light layer onto my eyes like multi-colored blindfolds.  Eventually, however, I settled into letting the pulsating light wash over me.  While I kept my eyes open at all times, the experience of seeing in the Perceptual Cell was similar to the experience of closing one's eyes really tightly and seeing colorful bursts--a phenomenon that is apparently known as phosphenes.  Strangely enough, the experience felt extremely short, and of course, singular and unique.  

After coming out of Light Reignfall, I experienced an entirely different kind of perception experiment through Dark Matters (2011).  This work is from Turrell's Dark Space series (which Turrell describes as facilitating the difficulty of 
"[differentiating] between seeing from the inside and seeing from the outside").  Directed by a wonderful guide with a calming voice, I was led through a snaky unlit corridor into a pitch black room and asked to sit down.  After what seemed like a few minutes of staring into complete nothingness, my eyes adjusted to focus on a faint glow far off in the distance.   Contemplative yet still unnerving, the experience allowed me to focus on how my eyes adjust to the environment around me.

The last work I experienced was Breathing Light (2013), an entire room.  In fact, you need to line up in an external corridor, then wait in a corral area, and then ritualistically enter the temple to light that is the work.  It's a Ganzfeld--the German term for "entire field"--where being inside the space deprives you of all clues as to any sense of direction or depth.  In comparison to the other two immersive works, Breathing Light was extremely calming and peaceful.  Having experienced an afternoon of Turrell, I was reminded that Alain de Botton commented in Art as Therapy that Turrell is a "choreographer of experience [we] might have" and not a recorder of an experiences he once had.  And master choreographer he most certainly is.

I was reminded that one of Turrell's Skyscapes is installed very close to home.  Open during certain afternoons, it's Meeting (1978), created in MoMA PS1 since 1986.  A parting image from my experience of the work in 2012:

James Turrell: A Retrospective is on view at LACMA until April 6, 2014.

All images (except Meeting) by Florian Holzherr, courtesy of LACMA
All works © James Turrell

Seen to the left is an image of a work by Fukahori Riusuke.  It's a three-dimensional work depicting a goldfish in a wooden sake cup.  

First brought to Japan in the 16th century from China (where goldfish were symbols of prosperity), goldfish were first kept as pets by Japanese aristocrats.  According to Kingyo: The Artistry of Japanese Goldfish, goldfish became popular among the general public in the 19th century, giving rise to a culture of breeders, collectors and connoisseurs.  

Since then, goldfish have become a  Japanese cultural stand-in for summer--a microcosmic respite of peaceful coolness in an otherwise hot and humid season.  Goldfish swim around in collective cultural memory, as the Japanese look forward to annual summer carnivals featuring midway stalls of a game called kingyo sukui (where one attempts to scoop up goldfish using a paper scoop and take home their caught fish in plastic baggies).

Sukui is the Japanese word for "scoop" but its synonym also refers to "salvation."  Fukahori claims that goldfish--as a subject for his oeuvre--provides just that.

Fukahori's goldfish are actually finely applied layers of paint sandwiched between layers of acrylic.  He carefully paints the goldfish from a bird's eye-view (starting at the lowest layer and progressing upwards), differentiating the delicate fins and scales depending upon which layer of acrylic he is painting upon.  After this painstaking process, Fukahori's goldfish appear so life-like that they appear to be real fish frozen in acrylic.  

Fukahori treated viewers to a live painting recently.  He explained to me that the painting of goldfish involves multiple stages, and the "layering over" of initial strata, erasing that which exists at the outset.  These photographs evidence Fukahori's method, as he first began with abstract dots that changed into a landscape, then a bathing scene with nudes, additional abstract strokes, and then, finally, layers of white and red over the course of about 30 minutes.