Clifford Ross’s work is immersive and fascinating on every tier of the way humans interact with art.
Ross, the New York-based artist perhaps most known for his black-and-white Hurricane series capturing wind-churned waters while tethered to shore, is a multimedia mastermind who has been featured in MoMA, the Met, the Guggenheim and overseas. His latest body of work, Landscape Seen & Imagined, is now on display at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA).
Landscape Seen & Imagined is a magnificently large-scale survey spanning two buildings, six galleries and an outdoor courtyard. The centerpiece, a towering 25-foot-high, 114-foot-wide photograph printed on raw wood, spans the entire length of the museum’s tallest gallery and would dwarf even several viewers standing on each other’s shoulders.
And that’s just the start. Ross also offers an animated video loop on twelve 24-foot-high screens and his majestic photographs of storm waves and mountains, along with an augmented reality component.
“While this show is about acute observation and the leaps into abstraction that can happen with close viewing, it is also about the divergence between the world as we see it and as we imagine it might be,” says MASS MoCA Director Joseph Thompson.
Every facet of Landscape Seen & Imagined evokes a new spark of appreciation for Ross’s perspective, but the piece is exceedingly spellbinding. Ross has worked with Duggal fine art account manager Hillary Altman for the past five years and called on us to execute his grand vision for the unconventional medium. Duggal’s wide format team produced 90 panels, each matching perfectly in both size and visual flow. The end result is easily one of the largest museum-quality photographs you will ever see.