Inclusive vs. Exclusive. Inspired by a James Turrell’s installation, I wanted to showcase the difference experience of physically being in an environment and simply seeing an image of it on a device. I took the photograph inside James Turrell’s Skyspace installation in Austin, Texas. The installation is an hour-long experience, during sunrise or sunset, inside a circular room with an ellipse opening on the ceiling where the sky is shown. There are LED colored lights around the wall that gradually change through the hour as the color of the sky changes as well. Essentially, Turrell plays with the idea of color theory, showing how two colors together can either add or take away from each other. With this in mind, the idea of a color taking away from the other, I wanted to showcase how seeing a photograph on a device, whether it was sent through a text message or shared through social media, diminishes the real experience compared to actually being where the photograph was taken. Apart from that, this message is also shown through the scale of the photograph. On the left, there’s the photograph shown in a small scale on an iPhone screen, and on the right the photograph is expanded, coming out to the viewer’s face to give the viewer a sense of the installation space. Ultimately, the experience in the photograph shown on the iPhone is limited compared to how exclusive the image on the right makes the viewer feel.
