I was greeted by a familiar yellow glare when I stepped off the elevator into Olafur Eliasson’s survey Take Your Time. In the fall of 2003, I had the pleasure of seeing The Weather Project, his seminal work that was a commission for the Tate Modern’s massive Turbine Hall. To say it was impressive is a pale understatement: upon arrival, my friend Jen and I followed the glow of that yellow through the museum entrance, and when we rounded the corner into the hall, she clawed my arm and gasped “Oh…My…Lord!” (she’s Texan). At the end of the five hundred-foot-long hall was the sun, or rather, an artificial construct of it made possible by bright, yellow lamps behind a semicircle screen positioned against a mirror ceiling towering ninety feet above our heads. The mirror completed the circle and doubled the viewers’ perception of the space, so that the audience could see their own reflection from an unusual, lengthy vantage point. Eliasson even crafted the air and atmosphere of the hall: fog was continuously pumped in and the sodium lamps he chose made everyone and everything appear duotone—like an aged Chaplin film, we were all soft yellow and shades of black. The collected sum of all of this artifice created a natural camaraderie among the viewers. People laid on the museum floor facing the "sun" as if at the beach, and sometimes twisted their bodies together to form words in the mirrored ceiling above. The scene felt reminiscent of other gatherings for natural phenomena, like sightings of an eclipse or the aurora borealis, and perhaps that is why we all so willingly participated in the elaborate staging.

At SFMoMA, Eliasson's trademark yellow light is once again at the threshold of the exhibition. His installation Room for one color (1997), however, yields the opposite effect of The weather project—it’s more like standing on the sun rather than basking in it. A Frenchwoman who stepped off the elevator with me shielded her eyes and grumbled “Merde!” The entryway near the elevator that contains the installation is quite small and the glare from the light is intense, so everyone is a yellow-and-black-Kenneth-Anger polarized version of themselves. People walked through quickly to escape its severity. The disparate physiological reaction of the audience to the same yellow light is an excellent example of Eliasson’s nimble mastery of the space-light medium.

Room for one color (1997), installation at Malmö Konsthall, Sweden

Room for one color is the median in terms of the size and scope of the works on view (rest assured, it is the only pointedly uncomfortable work). Perhaps it was unfair to begin this review with a description of a work that you will not see, but it is precisely Eliasson’s seminal, grandiose works that are missing from this exhibition. Most of his important works demand space, and that is only made possible by large-scale institutions. SFMoMA certainly belongs to this category, and the absence of these in his survey is puzzling. Instead, Take Your Time primarily consists of modest, room-sized installations selected from his body of work from 1993 to the present, including a commissioned kaleidoscope tunnel for the 5th floor turret bridge. I recommend thinking of these rooms as small vignettes for the larger picture not seen.

There are benefits to the exhibition’s scale, because what it lacks in ambition, it makes up for in intimacy. The works require a patient eye and an awareness of how one is physically situated in space, so obey Eliasson’s instruction in the title and take your time. The commissioned tunnel is only one of five kaleidoscope structures and the others conjure precious moments of solitude by only allowing enough room for a single viewer. You can get lost in the serial dramatic angles of your own face interspersed with slices of light and reflections of your surroundings.

Beauty (1993), installation at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Eliasson’s adeptness at influencing our senses and physiological actions is most sensational when coupled with notions of beauty that emulate nature. This is not the forum to argue about universal aesthetic truths, but there seemed to be a consensus amongst viewers on his installation Beauty (2003), an appropriately titled work consisting of a curtain of mist under a spotlight in a dark room. By moving around the room, you can find a rainbow. Viewers were literally whispering "ohh" and "ahh". Another example is 360º room for all colors (2002), a circular room that slowly changes hue through the entire color spectrum. Some of the colors brought about very specific memories for me—like during the slow transition from white to blue that reminded me of that dawn morning after a snow and no sleep on a mountain in New Mexico. I had never been enveloped in that color again until now.

Eliasson makes all operations of his fantastical installations apparent by showing the water faucets, the light fixtures, the exterior constructions, etc. I appreciate his strategy to show both the Great and Powerful Oz and the man behind the curtain—it dutifully quenches the postmodern need for transparency. But I must admit that after I visited the 2nd floor and experienced Anthony McCall’s You and I, Horizontal, an installation of three-dimensional beams from a projector, I was grateful to be able to completely lose myself in an illusion.

Lastly, while the museum may have not shown the ambitious breadth of Eliasson’s oeuvre, it does not disappoint in scholarship. The catalogue for the exhibition is exceptional. It includes appropriately distributed essays and a catalogue raisonne of his projects from 1991-2001. Here you can see full page spreads of all his accomplished works not seen here, including excellent documentation of The Weather Project.