Clifford Ross Sightlines

"A major survey of one of the world’s preeminent multimedia artists, Clifford Ross. American artist Clifford Ross is steeped in the traditions of modernism across a range of media, but his photographic and video practices over the past 30 years reveal one of the most incisive and technically sophisticated investigations into the nature of vision in the medium’s history. His art is characterized by relentless inventiveness and iteration; Ross explores the expressive possibilities of his subjects through newly created media, working at a variety of different scales. Viewers of his work might find themselves immersed in waves from a hurricane, printed with incredible resolution on 12-foot-tall panels of maple-veneered plywood or depicted as digital pixels crashing across enormous LED screens. Sightlines, the first major exhibition of Ross’ work in Maine, explores this relentless exploration of the natural world, prompting audiences to engage with the vitality and wonder of nature itself in an era of global climate change, as well as to reconsider the condition of the photograph. It showcases the range and depth of his photographs by presenting the inexhaustible variety of visual experiences he has created within his two primary subjects—a single mountain in Colorado, and hurricane-generated waves breaking along the coast of Long Island—demonstrating his capacity to convey creative energy through sustained looking at this limited number of subjects, and even through a limited number of source images. Ross uses his defined set of motifs to generate a large series of artwork across multiple media, each with a different and distinct character. Indeed, he has pushed the technical limitations of his chosen media to fundamentally new places, including through the invention of new technologies to achieve his vision, as with the case of his R1 camera. The exhibition promises to buoy viewers’ wonder at the experience of art and nature, helping them to reconnect with the instinct to want to “see more,” or “see more deeply”."--