In this major mid-career museum survey, Landscape Seen & Imagined documents Clifford Ross’ longstanding project to reconcile realism and abstraction. The exhibition takes place throughout two buildings, six galleries, and an exterior performing arts courtyard.
In the museum’s tallest gallery, for example, Ross’s Harmoniums — small details extracted from the large Mount Sopris image and then accentuated with bright hues — are made visible to visitors through their smartphones. Juxtaposed against the stark power of the mountainscape — which is rendered as a negative in black ink — the Harmoniums infuse the viewing experience with color and interactive movement.
The exhibition also includes a new series of video works entitled Digital Hurricane Waves, at first shown in a minimally improved, 12,000 square-foot space never before utilized at MASS MoCA and now featured in the museum’s first-floor gallery space. Computer-generated renderings of complex fluid dynamics are projected onto large screens, which combine to form what the artist calls a Wave Cathedral.
Deeply anchored in tradition, Ross’s radical and technologically advanced Mountain photographs are influenced by his fascination with Albert Bierstadt’s and Frederic Church’s iconic views of the American West, which he studied while at Yale University and which he has described as “my salvation from the certain death of a narrow aesthetic inheritance — namely Clement Greenberg’s formalism and the Color Field tradition I was born into.” Ross embraces Turner, Courbet, Hokusai, and 19th-century photographer Gustave Le Gray as predecessors to his Hurricane series. His interest in the interplay of realism and abstraction — the seen and imagined — relies on sources that range from Rembrandt to Pollock, Cezanne to Northern Sung painter Fan Kuan.
EXHIBITION
Landscape Seen & Imagined
Clifford Ross
On view through April 17, 2016
MASS MoCA
87 Marshall St
North Adams 01247
Massachusetts
USA
http://www.massmoca.org
http://www.cliffordross.com
