Allen Ruppersberg: I associate light as a medium more with art and space people and I'm not in that group particularly. So in this case, it's more like a Dan Flavin use of light, in the fact that it just comes from the hardware store and is a complement to the kind of more art-associated elements of the work. I mean, you have canvas, a lot of canvas, a lot of raw canvas. And so that particularly in this way that they're stretched over plywood boxes, it comes out of an influence of minimalism, I'm sure. It's hard to remember after 50 years what you were thinking about, of course.

When it was originally shown where I originally made it, it was in an old office room, so there was no light in there anyway. I mean, there was light from the windows and stuff, but you couldn't see that. So when you walked in, you literally walked into this. You couldn't walk around it. So you had to have lights in there in order to give it some kind of presence. And it was supposed to be a specific kind of location. You couldn't identify the location, but it had all these different elements. It had the art-related canvas boxes. Then it had nature and then it had the hardware store. So you kind of had to put all of these things together. And then it creates some kind of sense of a place, an unidentifiable place, of course, but I was interested in senses of what places were at that time.