Oh no, it’s another road trip travelogue. At the beginning of August, my two best buds and I drove up to Montreal from New York and had an extremely charming time. Here are my notes, featuring narwhals, toilet plants, a garbage barge, a graveyard, several breakfasts, Leonard Cohen, Librairie Drawn & Quarterly, “luxury rubbish,” Blink-182 (Syd wanted to note that we all sang along), dirt bowls, nickel-sized hail, and disco water. Please forgive my awful French.
Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson has proved over the years that he’s producing some of the most mesmerizing works of art, playing with light and color, challenging his viewers’ perception of space. In 2007, he created a one-way color tunnel, now in the collection of the SFMoMa (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), installed on a semi-transparent elevated walkway.
“One-way color tunnel is an arched walkway constructed from triangular panels of color-effect acrylic glass and acrylic mirrors. The panels are assembled into a rugged form, with the longest triangles at the base of the tunnel and the shortest triangles forming pyramidal outcroppings on the ceiling. As visitors move through the passageway, they see a fluctuating display of varied hues caused by the color-effect acrylic glass, which changes tone depending on how light strikes it. When they look back, however, instead of seeing the colorful environment they just passed through, they are met with the dull black backs of the panels, with only hints of color escaping through the interstices.”
As visitors move through the passageway, they see the fluctuating effect of light and reflections created by the color-effect acrylic and acrylic mirrors. On one side, the tunnel’s triangular panels seem completely black; from the other end, a multicolored spectrum shines through, changing as the viewers walks by.
