"The Dream House can inspire sincere self-reflection—of how people physically move, of how little time there is for stillness, of how we’ve become trained to seek and to reward movement and action. To embrace the Dream House is to become entranced and lost in time. And with no permanent closing date established for Young and Zazeela’s collaborative installation, this could be the dream that never ends."
-The Brooklyn Rail (June 2003), Nick Stillman.
"Intense light [is] aimed through [color] filters at quasicalligraphic aluminum shapes hung by ultrafine filaments. The effect is a unique and extraordinary transvaluation of perception: the mobiles seem to hover unanchored, while the shadows they cast in various hues attain an apparent solidity against the light-dissolved walls equal to their literally palpable but apparently disembodied sources. Like Young's music, to which it serves as an almost uncanny complement, Zazeela's work is predicated upon the extended duration necessary to experience the nuances which are its essence."
-Minimalism:Origins (Indiana University Press, 1993), Edward Strickland.
"The spirals’ ultra-slow spin is induced by air currents from a viewer’s movements or thermal differences in the room. This creates a slowly changing composition of shadows and objects in varying intensities of contrasting hues. … [Henry] Flynt notes that the rare drift into compositional alignment by these dynamically independent objects implies a time scale that can encompass an infinite series of permutations. The group on the north glides momentarily into an approximate bilateral symmetry, and I check the alignment of the group on the other side. Given the scale of the room, the compositions on both sides cannot be compared in a single view, and as I look to the other side I sweep my head through a melody. The interplay between movement and stasis, of sound and light, directly integrates these works. Each becomes the context for the other."
-Architectural Design (Wiley, Vol. 78 No.3, May-June 2008), Ted Krueger.
The Romantic Symmetry (over a 60 cycle base) in Prime Time from 112 to 144 with 119 / Time Light Symmetry (Dia Art Foundation, 22nd Street, NYC 1989):
"...some of the strangest and most forward-looking art New York has to offer."
-The Village Voice, Kyle Gann.
New York and Lyon Dream House installations:
"For the majority of compelling pieces here were the older ones, among them a few whose very appearance dramatized that vertiginous sense arising when objects from different eras come into incongruously close contact. ("Time does not pass," Bourriaud writes of the effect, "it 'percolates'"). In this department first honors must be awarded to La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House, 1993―. At its location in the Tribeca section of New York City, this roomful of infinitely repeating cycles of sound and light frequencies is a veritable wormhole in the urban fabric. (Outside it is 2006; inside it seems perpetually 1985, the year Young and Zazeela’s MELA Foundation opened its doors. It has since maintained an artist’s-loft sensibility once indigenous to the area.) Relocated to the cavernous industrial space of La Sucrière, however, the piece created other wrinkles in time, seeming at once placed at the cultural roots of European rave and trance culture—indeed, Lyon artistic director Thierry Raspail told me that Young obtained the very latest subwoofers for the occasion (the deep pulses raising the roof and making the floor feel ready to cave in)—and also utterly futuristic. Indifferent to Young’s deafening drones was the medieval architecture along the Saône river, visible through the installation’s tinted windows."
-Artforum.
1992 DAAD Ruine der Künste, Berlin environment:
"A longer stay in the Dream House is necessary to experience the full effect. The mind is calmed by the environment in a meditative way, and subtle sound and light effects that are veiled at first sight then come to the fore." Of the current environment, Sandy McCroskey wrote in 1/1 "Zazeela's light sculptures have invariably, teasingly refused to surrender their entire secret to photographic reproduction, so much do they depend on the retinal impact of activated photons in real time and so much do they exploit, in ways analogous to Young's techniques, the creation of visual combination tones and an accumulation of after-images."
-Die Tageszeitung.