‘Straight Flush’

American light artist James Turrell creates big, bold installations that generate worldwide fanfare, like his Roden Crater in Arizona or Skyspaces built into mountains or accessed through a swimming pool. But sometimes a Turrell work lives quietly amongst us. In downtown Toronto’s busy financial district, thousands of suits walk past a James Turrell daily. The artwork, entitled Straight Flush, is a sequence of five large vertical rectangles of light lined up on a marble wall on the ground floor of a bank tower. Colours pulsate in pastels — mauve, pink, blue — on a very slow loop that evokes the ever-changing sky. (Or, to cite a lower brow artwork, those retro lava lamps.) The lights are designed to be in constant motion —they appear a different colour and configuration every time you pass by. 

Straight Flush is located inside the lobby of the Bay Adelaide Centre, which is free to access during normal business hours. But with the building’s 28-feet glass windows, you can also observe it from the street, anytime of day or night. Stand and watch, however, and what you’ll see is a city going about its business, barely noticing the movement of light, or contemplating how it changes the space around it. Their loss is your gain: It’s one of the only places in the world you can have a James Turrell all to yourself.Six years after Straight Flush was installed, Toronto's biggest cultural export Drake used James Turrell's style as inspiration for his viral "Hotline Bling" video.