Exceptional Works: Doug Wheeler

DN ND WD 180 EN - NY 24, 2024

Reinforced fiberglass, flat white titanium dioxide latex, gloss white epoxy, LED light, and DMX control

18¼ x 64¼ x 67⅗ feet 
5.56 x 19.58 x 20.60 m

“When you’re flying, you’re up there by yourself, and you’re dealing with this incredible vault all around you. You think, ‘Oh, I’ll just do a 180’—and it’s like night and day. I want to bring that into an experience that other people have.’”

 

—Doug Wheeler

Doug Wheeler in his studio, New Mexico, 2024. Photo by Porter McLeod

DN ND WD 180 EN - NY 24 (2024) is a new installation by Doug Wheeler. On view is an immersive environment by the artist that further expands on his groundbreaking investigations of the possibilities of luminous space.

Presented in the exhibition Doug Wheeler: Day Night Day, DN ND WD 180 EN - NY 24 distills the phenomenon of perceiving day and night as simultaneously occurring over the expanse of the sky while in flight. The artist has described how, while flying an airplane, he would sometimes see daylight on the distant horizon in one direction, and if he turned his plane 180 degrees, the darkness of night on the opposite horizon. Wheeler’s experiences with flying go back to his childhood, when he would frequently travel by plane with his father, a doctor who cared for patients throughout remote areas of North central Arizona where there were few specialized physicians. Wheeler was often allowed to fly his father’s small planes—experiences that made a lifelong impression on him and taught him about the qualities and effects of light. “When I was growing up,” he has said, “the sky was everything for me.”

Doug Wheeler with his plane, New Mexico, 2024. Photo by Porter McLeod

Doug Wheeler in his studio, New Mexico, 2024. Photo by Porter McLeod

Doug Wheeler in the painted desert, Arizona, c. 1970

Wheeler with Bellanca Cruisemaster and his German shepherd Zero, c. 1969

Doug Wheeler, Kiva Skylight, 2623 Main Street studio, Ocean Park, Santa Monica, California, 1972. Four Polaroid color prints

 

Upon entering the gallery, the viewer first encounters two luminous rectangular thresholds, or “walls,” of light, which function as points of entry into an expansive environment that produces the experience of limitless space, or a “ganzfeld,” where light appears to shift from day to night and back again. The viewer’s perception is heightened to a degree in which, as the artist articulates, “space appears as a volume, almost as matter.”

Doug Wheeler, DN ND WD 180 EN - NY 24, 2024

Doug Wheeler, DN ND WD 180 EN - NY 24 (Addendum), 2024

Doug Wheeler, ER DW 13 NY DZ 14, 2013

 

“I create absence. The whole point is not sensory deprivation but to create a featureless environment where we begin to see the particlized aspect of space—the sensed structure of space itself.... We see particles of light held in suspension and experience a sense of limitless space.”

—Doug Wheeler

Installation view, Doug Wheeler: Day Night Day, David Zwirner, New York, 2024

DN ND WD 180 EN - NY 24 represents a continuation of Wheeler’s pioneering light installations. After constructing his first absolute light environment in 1967 in his Venice Beach studio, in 1969, the artist showed his first such installation publicly at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. This work incorporated a “light wall” using a single row of daylight neon lights embedded inside a viewing aperture that encompassed the entire dimensions of the gallery wall within an enclosed space. A further light wall was installed at Tate Gallery in London the following year.

Installation view, Robert Irwin—Doug Wheeler, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1969

Doug Wheeler, Untitled—Pico Light Environment, (partial view), 2683 West Pico Boulevard studio, Los Angeles, 1966–1967

 

Doug Wheeler, SA MI DW SM 2 75 Continuum Atmospheric Environment, 1975. Two rooms. Installation views showing gradational light cycle, Doug Wheeler, Galleria Salvatore Ala, Milan, 1975

Doug Wheeler, SA MI DW SM 2 75 Continuum Atmospheric Environment, 1975. Two rooms. Installation views showing gradational light cycle, Doug Wheeler, Galleria Salvatore Ala, Milan, 1975

Doug Wheeler, SA MI DW SM 2 75 Continuum Atmospheric Environment, 1975. Two rooms. Installation views showing gradational light cycle, Doug Wheeler, Galleria Salvatore Ala, Milan, 1975

Doug Wheeler, SA MI DW SM 2 75 Continuum Atmospheric Environment, 1975. Two rooms. Installation views showing gradational light cycle, Doug Wheeler, Galleria Salvatore Ala, Milan, 1975

The present installation also relates to SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 (1975/2012), which is, like the present work, titled for the places and dates of its installation (at Galleria Salvatore Ala, Milan, in 1975 and David Zwirner New York in 2012).

As the art historian Germano Celant writes, “SA MI DW SM 2 75 Continuum Atmospheric Environment (1975) ... becomes the first in a series of immersive ganzfeld installations that Wheeler calls continuum atmospheric environments.... In an aspect unique to this original work, the light cycle fades to total darkness before resuming its progression back to daylight.”

Doug Wheeler, SA MI 75 DZ NY 12, 1975/2012. Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland. Installation view, David Zwirner, New York, 2012

Doug Wheeler, SA MI 75 DZ NY 12, 1975/2012. Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland. Installation view, David Zwirner, New York, 2012

 

Wheeler has continued to explore similar effects by manipulating architecture in distinct ways and with different types of lighting, creating installations—including DN ND WD 180 EN - NY 24—that explore the perceptual possibilities of light and space, and in which the viewer experiences the sensation of entering an infinite void.

Doug Wheeler, Untitled, 1976. Gradational glass, window film, gray latex paint applied to existing architecture, and natural light. Installation view, Forty, MoMA PS1, room S205, Long Island City, New York, 2016

Installation view, Doug Wheeler: Day Night Day, David Zwirner, New York, 2024

Installation view, Doug Wheeler: Day Night Day, David Zwirner, New York, 2024

 

“Wheeler is able to make ... a single, magical experience, one that reconciles … knowledge and perception.”

—Karen Rosenberg, The New York Times, 2014

Doug Wheeler: Day Night Day