Clifford Ross

Typical of Ross’ dialectical working process, he found his next subject, far from the ocean in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado: Mount Sopris. Realizing the limitations of existing film and digital cameras, he invented the R1 high-resolution camera system, which uses military aerial film and a unique digital post-production process, capable of capturing the individual shingles on a barn from 4,000 feet away. The resulting photographs–the Mountain series–are among the highest resolution single shot landscapes in the world. He received U.S. Patent 6,795,648B1 for his camera.

Ross’s high-resolution photograph of the Texas Hill Country was the basis for the imagery of a 28’ x 28’ stained glass wall, titled The Austin Wall. The wall includes oversize hydraulically controlled doors, which open to combine two large-scale interior spaces for public events. It was executed in conjunction with Franz Mayer & Co. of Munich, with whom Ross worked to combine centuries old stained glass techniques with 21st-century digital technology. The completed work was unveiled in 2013 and awarded the U.S. General Services Administration Honor Award in 2014.

The Mountain Redux and Harmonium series signal a turn to abstraction based on the hyper-detailed Mountain photographs. Describing his trajectory from the Mountain series to his Mountain Redux work and the video world of Harmonium Mountain, Ross stated, “I broke down the realism of my ‘Mountain’ images into black-and-white negatives, printed them on handmade paper... eventually leapt into an abstract world of color, and then into movement with animation.” The five years of work on the original Mountain photographs were followed by 12 years of working with ever more abstract depictions of Mount Sopris, and that work is ongoing.

Landscape Seen & Imagined, a major mid-career survey of Ross's work, was held at MASS MoCA in 2015 through early 2016. It included a massive, multi-screen outdoor installation of his Harmonium Mountain I video world with twelve 24' x 18' screens. The exhibition was the first to feature new work in both the Wood and Digital Wave series including 24' high x 114' long photograph on wood veneer that spanned the length of MASS MoCA's tallest gallery and the artist's Wave Cathedral, which presented a large-scale immersive environment on LED walls.

Ross's engagement with wood and photography began while developing the General Services Administration commission to create artwork for the U.S. General Federal Courthouse in Austin. Although he ultimately executed a large-scale stained-glass wall, he continued to develop a method to print on wood for seven years, initially printing in his studio on thin veneers. Throughout the process, including hand-selecting trees in the Midwest and developing a deep sensitivity to the wood grain, their physicality transformed the works into something beyond photography. Known now as Wood Prints, the first large scale work, Sopris Wall I, was created in 2015 for MASS MoCA, executed on ninety 4' x 8' panels and measured 24' x 114'.

This technical endeavor was developed in the service of Ross's artistic motivation–to reveal the immensity of his subject, it's ever changing light, and its astonishing number of details, all contributing to his experience of the sublime. The resulting work has drawn parallels to the Hudson River School. Photographs in the Mountain series are printed in a large format that envelopes the viewer, creating a "you are there experience."

In 2012, Ross collaborated with Chinese musician and composer Wu Tong on Harmonium Mountain II, which had its world premiere at China's Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing in November of that year. The U.S. premiere of Harmonium Mountain II was at the Asia Society in New York City in March, 2015.

In 2012, Ross was commissioned to execute a public art project for the newly built United States Courthouse in Austin, Texas, designed by Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects for the General Services Administration.

The short video known as Harmonium Mountain I, with an original score by Philip Glass, premiered at the Site Santa Fe International Biennial in 2010. The film’s official New York premiere was at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2011.

In 2002, in order to photograph Mount Sopris in Colorado, Ross invented the R1 camera, with which he made some of the highest resolution large-scale landscape photographs in the world. In 2005, he designed and built the R2 360 degree video camera and the i3 Digital Cyclorama with Bran Ferren and other imaging scientists at Applied Minds, Inc.

The series was originally photographed from 1996–2001 and was then extended by Ross in 2008, when he chose to capture the imagery with a digital camera instead of film. All the waves in the series were generated by hurricanes. Among his influences is J. M. W. Turner, with whom Ross shares a fascination with the violence of the sea. Ross has said, “[w]hen I’m shooting, the wind is often howling, the water is churning and pulling at me… A still image doesn’t move. But I have to try and deliver the wonder of movement through its absence—to find ways to telegraph the anxiety and delight of movement through a fixed image.” His drive to share the power of ocean waves with the viewer is not limited to his extreme efforts in capturing the image, but is central to Ross's obsessive and innovative printing methods as well. He spent a decade in the darkroom printing silver gelatin prints, and since 2009 has printed on wood veneer, pushing the photographic medium past its existing limits. He is known for his efforts to communicate the sublime in the Hurricane series, and in most of his other work as well.

Born in New York City, Ross earned a Bachelor of Arts in Art and Art History from Yale University in 1974, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1973. After his college years, his painting was influenced by Abstract Expressionism and the Color Field School, which included his aunt, Helen Frankenthaler. In 1980, he broke off his relationship with Clement Greenberg and many of the artists around him, with the exception of his aunt, with whom he maintained a close relationship throughout her life. Following his early career in painting and sculpture, Ross began his photographic work in 1995. A major milestone in his work is the Hurricane series, begun in 1996. The black and white images in the series depict large-scale ocean waves shot by Ross while in the tumultuous surf, often up to his chest, and tethered to an assistant on land.

Between 1974-1979, Ross's painting and sculpture work was entirely abstract. He determined that the only way forward was to find his own way into abstraction with a proper base in realism like the Abstract Expressionists and Color Field artists whom he admired. Ross stopped exhibiting for four years, studying figurative painting and sculpture at the National Academy of Design, and then continued on his own. By 1987, he was producing paintings that were tied to landscape imagery, but with a high degree of physical materiality and abstraction. In order to explore the landscapes that served as inspiration for his painting and sculptural works, Ross often took photographic studies, at times even using them as collaged elements to create imaginary scenes. Eventually, Ross's use of photography took over and by the mid-1990s he began to produce his first serious works in the medium.

Clifford Ross (born October 15, 1952) is an American artist who has worked in multiple forms of media, including sculpture, painting, photography and video. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.