Charles Ross is a pioneering member of a group of artists generally based in the West who explore light-driven relationships between objects and our perception, sometimes working in such varied media as acrylic and epoxy, sometimes utilizing utilitarian materials such as neon or fluorescent lights, and sometimes relying on the very movements of the Earth and the stars. This particular work arises out of his keen interest in prisms and prismatic effects, as can also be seen in a complex installation commissioned by the Getty for its 2024-25 show “Lumen. Ross also engages in a particularly unique way with the land itself, literally, as he says, “entering the Earth in order to reach the stars.” His central and indeed monumental work is the sculptural structure named Star Axis, an eleven-story high pyramidal installation excavated into and emerging from a lonesome plateau in New Mexico, a work that he commenced in 1971. The work offers visitors a human-scale experience of the progression of Earth’s 26,000 year cycle of a changing axial orientation to the stars, an astronomical phenomenon known as “precession.”
The Brooklyn Rail | September 2024 | In Conversation
Charles Ross With Michael Straus
