ART : Experience of Light Can Be Illuminating in Installation at Security Pacific Gallery

Sitting in the small dark room that houses James Turrell’s light installation, “Night Light,” at Security Pacific Gallery in Costa Mesa (through Dec. 17), a visitor imagines what it must have been like at Woodstock, having just ingested the drug of the hour and waiting for the stuff to take effect--without being absolutely sure what you’re waiting for.

At least back then there was someone else to query.

“You feel strange yet, Joe?”

“Yeah, I think I can see big colored lights.”

In the small dark room, however, you are alone. You’ve been told you should plan on staying put for 20 minutes or so. You’ve felt your way to a seat. The room is cool on a hot day. Your thoughts drift to weekend plans. Hmm, it would be nice to close your eyes for a while and just relax. . . .

No, you can’t do that. You’re here to observe . But observe what? The far wall is black. The side walls are black. The floor is black. Voices elsewhere in the gallery grow louder and recede. Heels click. Minutes pass.

Finally, you see something--a central blur of white light. It’s not too thrilling, and you wonder if it will it turn into something else. Later, you begin to think that the mild worry factor in this piece (“Is this it? Is there more?”) intrudes somewhat on pure sensation.

An ancient memory from a junior high school science class floats up from the abyss. You’d been assigned to draw a picture of what you saw under a microscope and--doubtful that you were seeing everything you should be--you cheated and copied a picture from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Your teacher called you aside after class and told you the microscopes in junior high classrooms were too low-powered to register the teeming miniature jungle in your drawing.

But, ah! Now you see the central blur, and pairs of smaller white blurs on either side, one on top of the other, like windows.

You scrutinize this ensemble of blurs. Finally, you close your eyes and the image doesn’t go away. When 25 minutes have passed, the gallery assistant comes to get you.

Explaining what you saw, you ask: “Was that it?”

“Yes,” he says.

The catalogue for the exhibition explains that both “Night Light” and the accompanying “Alien Exam” are intended to heighten the viewer’s awareness of how things are seen, rather than what is seen. The text also briefly mentions that “Night Light” calls into play the two kinds of photosensitive cells in the retina--the rods, used in conditions of dim illumination, and the cones, which allow us to see colors and objects in bright light.

Turrell, who has a major reputation as an artist working specifically with light, is not concerned with demonstrating scientific principles, however. He is quoted in the book “Occluded Front”: “What is really important to me is to create an experience of wordless thoughts, to make the quality and sensation of light itself something felt.”

“Alien Exam” yields more immediate thrills than “Night Light.” You start out in a doctor’s waiting room--with a desk, upholstered couches, boring landscape prints on the walls, magazines, a clock. The museum attendant ushers you into an examining room with another clock. You lie down on an operating table and the attendant cranks it up so that your eyes are inches away from a glass circle on the ceiling.

The light behind the circle becomes your universe. It is a heavenly blue color at first, but as you stare at it, the color slowly changes to a lush violet, then an intense pink, then violet again and finally back to sky blue.

The whole sequence takes no more than five minutes. Any unpleasant associations connected with the hospital setting evaporate with the exquisite, soothing sensation of the changing colors of light--like a sunset and sunrise created just for you. You forget that the gallery attendant is sitting by the bed, with one hand on the controls, playing God.

Turrell’s most ambitious piece to date, which is being created within a dead volcano 50 miles from Flagstaff, Ariz., partly involves the experience of watching the huge vaulted sky from the reconfigured bowl of the crater. “Alien Exam” (the title seems related to the spaceshiplike porthole through which the light is seen) offers a much simpler, miniaturized version of an aspect of the crater experience.

You wonder whether the waiting room setup is really necessary as a prelude to this piece. But Turrell is a believer in providing distinctive entryways into the sensory experiences he creates.

“I’m interested in having a work confront you where you wouldn’t ordinarily see it,” Turrell has said. “When you have an experience like that in otherwise normal surroundings, it takes on the lucidity of a dream.”

Jim Turrell’s “Night Light” and “Alien Exam” installations are at Security Pacific Gallery, 555 Anton Blvd., Costa Mesa, through Dec. 17. The gallery is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. Admission is free. Information: (714) 433-6000.

White Elephant Dept.: The Orange County Center for Contemporary Art has a new satellite exhibition space in the Pioneer Bank Building lobby (201 E. Sandpointe Ave., Santa Ana), donated by the Hutton Development Co.

With all due respect for the center’s efforts in obtaining the rent-free space, the corridorlike gallery--which, of course, was not designed to show art--looks distinctly like an afterthought. The textured tan walls are broken by columns and windows, the floor is a distracting brown-and-tan pattern garnished by rectangles of brown carpet, and the ceiling spotlights barely do the job.

Rather than integrating art into the life of a business center, this project has shunted it off to a tiny fringe area probably unusable in any other way, and has made no significant changes to accommodate it. So the developer gets to pat himself on the back for doing his philanthropic and cultural duty without having to commit to a serious outlay of space and money--or to a serious consideration of art as a first-class amenity.

For its part, the center has made a disappointingly timid choice of work for its debut exhibit there. Jean Towgood’s formulaic paintings of abstracted South Seas sunset scenes and ocean wave formations, on view through July 19, are polite and repetitious, and seem to know their place.