Charles Ross (artist)
[8][9][1] Artforum critic Dan Beachy-Quick wrote that "math as a manifestation of fundamental cosmic laws—elegance, order, beauty—is a principle undergirding Ross’s work … [he] becomes a maker-medium of a kind, constructing various methods for sun and star to create the art itself.
[18] In 1960, he graduated with a BA in mathematics, but was already moving towards art after taking a sculpture course to fulfill a liberal-arts requirement; he was attracted to the medium as a means of making abstract ideas physical.
[10][19][18] After earning an MA in sculpture from Berkeley in 1962, he spent the early years of his career in New York, initially producing assemblage works concerned with balancing shape and form.
[3][18][2] Curator and writer Klaus Ottmann has written that all of Ross's work emanates from "an early and enduring excitement about geometry" and a "preoccupation with the substance of light, the existence of its physical, quantum, and metaphysical expressions.
Ross's early work varied in both focus and materials, and included sculpture, environments, and collaborations with the experimental Judson Dance Theater and choreographer Anna Halprin.
[34][24][33][35] 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.
[18] He began using acrylic to construct transparent geometric forms of varying shapes filled with liquid that functioned as prisms—his first foray into the light-themed work that would be the enduring focus of his career.
[37][18] A 2020 Artforum review of the early prism works described them as offering a threshold into "a mode of contemplation that is exceedingly elemental, nearly imperceptible … Ross's humble objects are an art of philosophic passivity.
[29][1] Ross contributed solar spectrum artwork in the form of 24 enormous prisms strategically placed in the structure's apses and skylights, as well as astronomical design elements such as the building's orientation.
[8][29] Aligned with the sun to project different seasonal spectrum events and to evolve throughout the day with the earth's turning, the prisms cast immense rainbows in slashing patterns and shades that move around the room's curved plaster walls.
"[20] Beginning on the autumnal equinox of 1971, he meticulously recorded a year's worth of daily solar burns on carefully positioned, fire-treated white planks of wood exposed to sunlight passing through a large lens.
[39][31][20] According to art historian Thomas McEvilley, pop artist Andy Warhol brought The Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger to the opening, where they searched out the planks corresponding to their birthdays.
[6][8][1] Art in America's Jan Ernst Adlmann wrote that Ross's 2012 exhibition "Solar Burns" (Gerald Peters Gallery) translated "mathematical mystifications" and a purely scientific demonstration of "the sun’s flaring majesty into a work of abstract, searing beauty.
Lines of Light, Rays of Color (1985, Plaza of the Americas, Dallas) is a solar spectrum installation with 36 acrylic and optical fluid prisms, each weighing about 450 pounds, located in the skylights and window walls of an atrium.
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.
His performative "Explosion Drawings" were visualizations of the interaction of light and matter at the smallest scale, which referenced Richard Feynman's diagrams demonstrating principles in quantum mechanics.
