The materials checklist for “Day Night Day” (2024)jilibay, the artist Doug Wheeler’s perception-bending, full-body freak-out at David Zwirner in Chelsea, barely gives anything away: reinforced fiberglass, flat white titanium dioxide latex, gloss white epoxy, LED light — plastic, paint and lightbulbs, essentially. A shopping list easily fulfilled at most local hardware stores. Yet what Wheeler achieves with those materials is astounding in its totalizing effect.

After pulling on hospital booties and entering a slickly antiseptic antechamber, like Heaven’s waiting room as envisioned by someone with a dander allergy, you’re confronted with two phosphorescent thresholds you can’t completely be sure aren’t solid surfaces. (An attendant had to gently encourage me to move into the light.) Crossing them requires a suspension of the self-preservation reflex. The usual markers of solid space — ceiling, floor — are rubbed out.

The effect brings to mind “Duck Amuck,” a particularly Beckettian Looney Tunes short in which Daffy Duck finds himself at the mercy of an unseen animator’s brush, the background scenery repeatedly drained into nothingness. Wheeler provides just two tethers back to steady ground: a slight incline to cue a visitor to the void’s real endpoint; and the mechanics, fully visible above the doorway.

“Day Night Day” is meant to simulate the particular experience of seeing both daylight and the night sky simultaneously, on opposite horizons, a phenomenon Wheeler says he’s encountered while piloting his 1978 Cessna through the Southwest, and one he allows most people never will; part of the animating force here is that of a benevolent god whipping up a taste of celestial wonder.

Whether the effect is faithful is largely unverifiable, unless you too are an aviation hobbyist. The rest of us will have to take the artist’s word that his earthbound translation — a blinding white-out that shifts, almost imperceptibly, into a soft, pre-dawn pink — is what goes on at cruising altitude. More affecting is the retinal payoff, a refinement of Wheeler’s nearly lifelong project, now in its seventh decade, which is to make visible the substance of space itself.

ImageDoug Wheeler’s “Day Night Day” is a blinding white-out that shifts, almost imperceptibly, into a soft, pre-dawn pink.Credit...via David Zwirner

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• jilibay
• Wonder
• Doug
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