A few weeks ago, on one of those perfect summer days we were having, I was wandering around the Henry Art Gallery looking at something else when I decided to go into James Turrell’s Skyspace and sit for a minute. What happened next came in three acts so complete in their dramatic arc that as soon as they were over, I knew it was time to leave. That’s one of my anxieties in the Skyspace—figuring out where to sit, and how long to stay. There is no way to experience the Skyspace completely, so you take it in episodes, and I always want the episodes to assume some kind of shape, but they never do. Except this time.

I sat down on the right side closest to the museum as you walk in, and leaned my head back on the wall to peer up at the oval hole framing the sky painting, the sky cinema. Various things can happen in the intervening minutes. The edges of the hole can seem to blur, colors can seem to change. But what happened this time was not perceptual. Real objects intervened, in a tidy little afternoon narrative. First, a white feather floated by slowly, a significant event in a broadcast otherwise consisting entirely of cloudless blue sky. I watched the feather go, and the uninterrupted oval sky reassert itself. Then, a distant bird appeared and made its way in a path parallel to the feather. Blue-sky intermission again. And finally, a speck of a jet in the same direction. The show was over, so I left, thoroughly pleased in the way that only a conspicuously consuming, packaging-hungry American can be.

The Skyspace is getting a lot of action these days. You can attend a meditation class there at no charge this Saturday (Aug. 19th), Sept. 23, and Oct. 7, at 10 am. (Space is limited, so reservations are required; call 616-9894.)

And the Skyspace is soon to be the site of a one-night performance and several-month installation by the LA sound artist/painter James Roden, who created the constellation of abjectly magical twinkling tin cans in a dark room in last year’s In Resonance show at Bumbershoot.

Roden’s performance and a Q&A with associate curator Sara Krajewski will be at 7 pm next Thursday, Aug. 24. (This is the event I’ll most regret missing when I’m on vacation next week. For more info, Christopher DeLaurenti will preview it in his Stranger column next week.)

All I know about the performance is that it will incorporate Roden’s “unique improvisatory of building ambient electronic loops,” according to the Henry. The ongoing exhibition, which will be up through Oct. 15, will, like some of Roden’s other installations, work in tandem with the architecture of the space. Called day ring, night ring, it is two compositions, one 40 minutes long that plays in the Skyspace at specific times during museum hours, and the other running all night in the outdoor area near the Skyspace.

Henry events coordinator Fionn Meade, who curated In Resonance, writes about day ring, night ring for the New York Foundation for the Arts, calling it “perhaps the boldest of Roden’s current sound works,” incorporating violin and layered field recordings that “slip into the chamber to hover, entice, and pass—a mirror to the vantage of sky and clouds the space affords.”

This, you will have, if you do not have feather, bird, and jet plane.