UC Irvine

Charles Ross is an artist with a background in mathematics and sculpture who has incorporated light into virtually all of his practices. In addition to the ordinary light of everyday spaces, Ross makes use of celestial light as well as the elemental behavior of light. Using the art of Ross as a case study, I consider the way the artist’s engagement with light cultivates a multidimensional space that is at once subjective, physical, atmospheric, and temporal. By framing my analysis of Ross’s art around the elements of light and time, I aim to diverge from the existing emphasis on the role of perception in the critical reception of Ross’s work. Rather than concrete vehicles for perception, I situate the works in the transitory space between transparency and opacity. Ultimately, I believe the artworks’ comprehensive space is under-evaluated in the artist’s reception, not only because Ross’s precise use of mathematic and astronomic calculations biases interpretations that simply point to science, but also because this multidimensional space is beyond comprehension and resists interpretation. The comprehensive space of Ross’s work seems to approximate the complex interconnected web of the universe. In doing so, however, it presents a space that is just as difficult to grasp as the reality it approaches.