Clifford Ross
Landscape Seen & Imagined
MASS MoCA
1040 MASS MoCA Way
North Adams, MA 01247
www.massmoca.org
Landscape Seen & Imagined is MASS MoCA’s major survey of Clifford Ross’ work. Now on view, the exhibition encompasses six galleries across two buildings and an exterior courtyard in the museum’s former-factory campus. During the summer season, the exhibition’s Harmonium Mountain piece stretches the survey from day into night, lighting up the westernmost courtyard of MASS MoCA’s campus with twelve 24-foot video screens every weekend at dusk.
Landscape Seen & Imagined features video and photographic work spanning Ross’ career. It highlights his signature high-resolution works, which aim to reconcile realism and abstraction through the use of unconventional methods of photographing, editing and printing, as well as the interplay of extreme scale and microscopic detail. Massive, high-resolution photographic works are the centerpiece of Landscape Seen & Imagined, which offers a multisensory experience across media, drawing connections between elements of nature, music and architecture that are simultaneously monumental and lyrical.
The first part of Ross’ exhibition, housed in the museum’s three-story main galleries, includes the immense Sopris Wall I, a 24-foot-high, 114-foot-long photograph printed directly onto wood. Ross turns to the sea in a never-before-utilized building at the front of MASS MoCA’s campus, crowned with the museum’s iconic “roof letters,” whose post-and-beam loft has been developed into a serene 12000-square-foot exhibition space, housing Wave Cathedral—computer-generated renderings of complex fluid dynamics projected onto two large LED screens—as well as Ross’ landmark “Hurricane Waves” series, capturing vivid images of ocean waves during severe coastal storms.
Harmonium Mountain features a selection of recorded music selected by John Colpitts and screens every Thursday and Friday at dusk through September 4. Visitors also have the opportunity to experience Harmonium Mountain accompanied by a live musical performance that spans the spectrum from Vivaldi to psych-rock when St. Luke’s Orchestra performs on August 8 at 8:30pm. Colpitts’ Brooklyn-based band Oneida and special guest Lee Ranaldo open the show.
Harmonium Mountain represents a vital piece of Clifford Ross’ longstanding interest in the broad potential offered by the photographic medium. The elements in the video work, and in the Harmonium prints and Sopris wall, are sourced from a single photograph of Mount Sopris, located near Aspen, Colorado. Ross captured the photograph with an ultra-high resolution R1 camera of his own design. The Harmonium series depicts fragments of the original photograph in extreme close up, imbued with saturated hues to emphasize details otherwise invisible to the naked eye. In Harmonium Mountain, these elements become moving graphic components in a large-scale computer animation, creating dynamic, tumbling, crystalline forms.
Clifford Ross: Landscape Seen & Imagined will be accompanied by two fully illustrated volumes published by The MIT Press: Hurricane Waves, available now, and the broader narrative of Landscape Seen & Imagined, available in October 2016.
Media contacts:
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Justyna Zajac / Pamela Hernandez
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