Charles Ross

Charles Ross, Star Axis. Looking north toward the entrance to the Star Tunnel, a stairway exactly parallel to Earth's axis; earth, sandstone, granite, concrete, bronze, stainless steel; 11 stories high, 1/10th mile across; (1971–in progress).

Charles Ross (born 1937) is an American contemporary artist known for work centered on natural light, time and planetary motion. His practice spans several art modalities and includes large-scale prism and solar spectrum installations, "solar burns" created by focusing sunlight through lenses, paintings made with dynamite and powdered pigment, and Star Axis, an earthwork built to observe the stars. Ross emerged in the mid-1960s at the advent of minimalism, and is considered a forerunner of "prism art"—a sub-tradition within that movement—as well as one of the major figures of land art. His work employs geometry, seriality, refined forms and surfaces, and scientific concepts in order to reveal optical, astronomical and perceptual phenomena.

Ross has exhibited at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, PS1, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. His artworks are collected by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among other institutions. In 2011, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow. He lives and works in SoHo, Manhattan and New Mexico with his wife, painter Jill O'Bryan. He studied physics for two years at Penn State before transferring to the more liberal University of California, Berkeley in 1958. He was one of the original artist residents to join the historically significant artist cooperative at 80 Wooster Street organized by Fluxus founding member George Maciunas; the cooperative has been credited by cultural observers with the development of Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood into an art-world hub. After moving to San Francisco, Ross began his longstanding investigation of light in 1965, with the creation of large-scale prisms assembled in his warehouse studio. —after being introduced to Virginia Dwan by conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, whom critics cite as an influence in Ross's work. and continued a professional relationship with Dwan that culminated in their joint 1996 project, the Dwan Light Sanctuary. In the early 1970s, he began showing at other galleries, including the John Weber Gallery in New York, and conceived his large-scale earthwork project, Star Axis, which is still under construction. At that time he also purchased a larger, top-floor studio on Wooster Street, where he made some of his first solar burns on the roof.

Charles Ross, The Colors of Light, The Colors in Shadows; prism column: acrylic and optical fluid, 100" x 14" each side); painted white column: wood, 90" x 12" each side); John Weber Gallery, 1979.

Work Critics note in Ross's work a juxtaposition of aesthetic and conceptual appeal with the immediacy of natural forces that he records and displays. This work often showed an interest in process and motion—recurring themes in his art—as in Room Service (1963), a large, dynamic sculpture he created for a Judson Dance performance, which evolved in response to the movement of dancers.

In 1965, after a detailed dream about building a prism, Ross made a complete break from his assemblage work. His early prisms were modestly scaled, minimal variations on cubes that functioned as geometric objects and perceptual vessels, displaying different views and perspectives within their shapes. Each day's burn resulted in charred impressions with delicate, multidimensional feathered edges reflecting variations in weather patterns, day length, and factors related to the orientation of the Earth's axis in time. and throughout the United States. He created Rock Bow (1983) for a Chicago rapid-transit station—a 22-foot prism column that refracts sunlight entering the station through a dome with a 100,000-pound Indiana limestone base. The installation Spectrum Chamber, (2018, Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania) was a collaboration with architect Nonda Katsalidis. It employs a Corten steel cube with notches cut into it that house thirteen prisms refracting sunlight into rainbows across white porcelain-tile interior walls.

Films and other work Ross made two films in the 1970s: the 25-minute Sunlight Dispersion (1971) and the 8-minute Arisaig (Solar Eclipse) (1972). The New York Times described the former as combining scientific filming technology with "a truly artistic appreciation of colors" in its recording of prismatic changes of hue on a cup, chair, room and hand.

Recognition Ross's work belongs to the public collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Musée National d'Art Moderne (Centre Pompidou, Paris), Nevada Museum of Art, New Mexico Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, Weisman Art Museum, and Whitney Museum, Ross as featured in the film Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art (2015).