In Tanya Bonakdar’s upstairs gallery, one encounters a dark room housing a second, more static light installation. Beyond a heavy black drape, a rainbow of light is projected without fuss on the opposite wall. Produced by a somewhat threatening, human-scale mechanical device built on the same principle as the children’s toys and window ornaments that splinter light into its constituent hues, Eliasson’s rainbow emerges from one corner of the room and disappears in another. Its limits are precisely calculated, segmented by the room’s architecture, and the effect is to make the band of light run horizontally across the space like a perfect horizon line. While conjuring the kind of rapt attention fixed on a movie theater screen, it offers no narrative, sequence, or changing image. Instead, as the eyes become accustomed to the darkness, you pick up on the reflection of light continuing beyond the corners of the room, extending the rainbow past the physical boundaries of the space. Over time, the colors begin to shift slightly as well, becoming both more vivid and more distinct as the hues of the spectrum rise up to your attention and then sink back into the chroma gradient.

The projected light is surprisingly bright, and it can cause afterimages when you look away. The psychological effect is similar to Nam June Paik’s iconic Zen for TV, a Fluxus reworking of video technology in which a thin band of white light emitted by a cathode ray television monitor becomes a “drishti” for the gaze’s focus, transmuting entertainment value into meditative practice, allowing the mind to wander and observe itself. As with Paik’s work, Eliasson’s use of technology, focusing of attention, and dispassionate execution of light’s effects reorients us toward the various screens, boxes, vectors, and pulses of light that are integrated in our everyday routines of existence and interaction. Why not see the brilliance of the screen you’re reading this on as a form of Turrellian experience? While bathing us in an endlessly shifting spectrum of light, remaking technology as an experiment in optical perspective and luminosity, these works ask us: How could this constant patter of light waves not leave a psychic, or psychoacoustic, imprint?

I was reminded of a favorite lecture I saw by Maria H. Loh at the Getty Center in 2021, in which Loh shared excerpts of her ongoing project Liquid Sky, a short history of the sky in the visual arts of the pre-modern periods. Throughout much of art history, rainbows were not associated with leprechauns, Hawaiian license plates, or Pride marches, but rather were seen as hallmarks of exceptional events, powerful personages, and of divine intervention, representing Biblical storms brewing, the apocalypse, and political power personified through nature. Queen Elizabeth I adopted the rainbow as a symbol of her merciful rule, in which the rage of the storm and its clemency found visible form; this is apparent in her Rainbow Portrait emblazoned with the motto “Non Sine Sole Iris” (“No rainbow without the sun,” the sun signifying Elizabeth herself), in which she also wears a vest embroidered with ears and eyes — always listening, always watching. As regent and queen of France, Catherine de’ Medici’s portrait was made as a mythological allegory showing her as the warrior goddess Juno alongside the rainbow, a flock of peacocks, and billowing clouds — a token of her power to mediate between war and peace, provide protection or mete out justice. Similarly, in religious paintings of judgment day and the end of times, rainbows appear in the sky encircling Christ, representing the fissure between two worlds.