From his still unfinished 42 year old desert project named Star Axis to his work with light prisms and solar burns Charles Ross has spent a lifetime exploring the relationship of light and nature.
“Ross’s earthwork, Star Axis, is located in the New Mexico desert. It is both architectonic sculpture and naked eye observatory. The approach to building Star Axis involves gathering a variety of star alignments in different time scales and building them into sculptural form. Walking through its chambers you can see how star space relates to human scale and how the space of the stars reaches down into the earth. Ross conceived of Star Axis in 1971 and began building it in 1976 after a 4-year search through the southwest to find the perfect site—a mesa where one stands at the boundary between earth and sky. He’s now finishing Star Axis with a crew of local stonemasons. It’s made with granite, sandstone, bronze, stainless steel, and earth. When completed, Star Axis will be eleven stories high and a fifth of a mile across”.
via Charles Ross.
“Large-scale prisms are suspended in skylights and clear stories. Each is specifically aligned with the sun to project huge blocks of solar spectrum into the architectural space below. The spectrums continuously evolve throughout the day, expanding into bright washes or contracting into brilliant bands of solar color as they move through the space propelled by the turning of the Earth.
Each artwork is specific to the architecture and its location on the planet. The ultimate goal is to create a nexus of solar spectrum artworks around the globe so that as the spectrum sets in one location, it is always rising in another”.
via Charles Ross.
