James Turrell's 'Straight Flush' in Toronto: a poker den remade in coloured light
Toronto's Yorkville is one of the city's best-preserved streetscapes of late-19th-century Victorian villas. On one of those streets, behind the red-brick facade of a private home, sits an unusual basement installation by the American artist James Turrell. The piece is called "Straight Flush."
The work was commissioned in 2011 by a Canadian art collector. It replaced what had been a basement poker room and now houses a fully equipped small-scale example of a Turrell "Ganzfeld" installation, the immersive light-saturated rooms that have defined the artist's practice since the early 1970s.
Ganzfeld works strip a viewer of normal depth perception by surrounding them in a uniform field of colour. Turrell began developing the series in Pasadena in the 1970s. He has said the works are intended to bring a viewer to the realisation that "light is an object and space is not an empty canvas."
The Toronto room is about 25 square metres. Visitors enter barefoot, sit on a low bench at the threshold and look towards one corner of the room. In the first minutes a uniform green hue holds; then the colour migrates through blue, violet and a rose red. The full programme runs 22 minutes.
The collector told Atlas Obscura: "I spent close to three years just preparing the basement space. Measurements were taken at Turrell's studio; the build itself was prepared in Arizona." The installation is considered one of several by-products of the artist's long-running Roden Crater project.
The Atlas Obscura piece notes that the cabinet system used here matches the lighting hardware in Turrell's Pasadena studio. The main light source is not LED: the artist still favours tungsten-balanced fluorescent fixtures. Colour transitions are run from a remote-control dimmer panel.
The collector opens the room to the public on 12 dates a year at no charge. Each session admits only 18 visitors, and the annual booking list typically fills the same day it opens. Most visitors emerge with a mixture of "astonishment and the inability to record what they have seen," the collector said.
Most of Turrell's North American installations are accessible through museums: the Live Oak Friends Meeting House skyspace in Houston, the long-term Roden Crater project in New Mexico, the celebrated "Aten Reign" at the Guggenheim in New York. The Toronto installation is unusual in that it sits inside a private home.
The house itself is a notable piece of Yorkville architecture. It was built in the 1880s and listed as a heritage property in 1968. The internal alterations needed to integrate the work were approved by the Toronto Preservation Board.
Atlas Obscura traces Turrell's practice to two historical threads: the observatory tradition of the American Southwest, where Turrell still spends much of his time, and the Renaissance-era handling of light in Italian church interiors. Bookings for the 2026 season open on September 1 through an application form on the collector's website.