The Brooklyn Rail

Charles Ross is a pioneering member of a group of artists generally based in the West who explore light-driven relationships between objects and our perception, sometimes working in such varied media as acrylic and epoxy, sometimes utilizing utilitarian materials such as neon or fluorescent lights, and sometimes relying on the very movements of the Earth and the stars. But he also engages in a particularly unique way with the land itself, literally, as he says, “entering the Earth in order to reach the stars.”

His central and indeed monumental work is the nearly complete sculptural structure named Star Axis, an eleven-story high pyramidal installation excavated into and emerging from a lonesome plateau in New Mexico, a work that has been underway since 1971. The work is nearing completion and will offer visitors a human-scale experience of the progression of Earth’s 26,000 year cycle of a changing axial orientation to the stars, an astronomical phenomenon known as “precession.”

I spoke to Charles about the conceptual and physical aspects of Star Axis, as well as his work with prisms, the latter to form a key, commissioned element in the Getty Center’s upcoming show Lumen: The Art and Science of Light, which opens there in early September. Ross’s installation is part of the Getty’s continuing Pacific Standard Time series of explorations of light, space and land artists as well as related creative experiments; and will continue into 2025.

Michael Straus (Rail): I am with Charles Ross and his wife, the artist Jill O’Bryan, in their sunlit SoHo loft. Charles, that seems as good a framework as any to speak about how light informs your work.

Charles Ross: Light is everything.

Rail: The context for this interview is that you have an installation that will open at the Getty Center in Los Angeles on September 10 as part of its comprehensive show Lumen: The Art and Science of Light. As I understand it, the installation consists of an array of prisms in the Getty’s atrium that will cast broad spectrums of light changing throughout the day in response to the Earth’s constant rotation. And of course those relationships will vary from day to day, given the larger changes in Earth’s annual solar orbit. Deciding where to place each prism in the atrium obviously required some careful analysis of how the work would be experienced once in place, but how did you make those determinations in advance?

Ross: Spectrum 14 (2024– ) is made with fourteen large-scale prisms mounted in the skylights of the atrium. When I envisioned this piece, I saw people moving through the spectrum of light. The spectrums are constantly changing by the hour, day, and season, propelled through the space by the turning of the Earth. So, when you leave the museum, the spectrums will be in a different place than they were when you first saw them. Each person will have their own experience walking through the solar spectrum.

I have an architectural model of the atrium here in my studio that I work with, along with a sun-angle machine I invented a long time ago that allows me to create multi-prism solar spectrum installations. A single prism won’t capture the sun’s angles throughout an entire year. I need to place an array of prisms, with prisms oriented for different times of day, and different times of year.

Rail: So in effect, one prism hands the light off to another, almost like a relay race?

Ross: In slow motion. [Laughs] As one prism is fading out another one’s coming up. I begin choreographing the solar spectrums by trial and error. I start with one prism. It takes several weeks to place it while I’m learning how sunlight and shadow perform. By the time I’ve placed the first prism, I know how its spectrum will behave throughout the entire year. The sun-angle machine rotates and tilts the model in relation to a fixed spotlight that acts as the sun. You can see how the spectrums interact with the architecture through the summer solstice, the spring and fall equinoxes, and the winter solstice.

Rail: You are also working toward completing Star Axis (1971– ). Let’s shift to speak about that project, the monumental enterprise in New Mexico that has occupied your time since the early seventies. It has yet to be seen by all but a relatively few people. I think those who are unfamiliar with it will be stunned at the physical as well as conceptual scope of the work. So, what’s it all about? What are you trying to convey? Or perhaps better stated: what do you want visitors to experience?

Ross: I can’t tell people what to experience. Star Axis is an earthwork to observe the stars. It’s built with earth, granite, sandstone, concrete, and steel. It’s eleven-stories high and a tenth of a mile across. There are five main elements, each capturing different layers of time: the Star Tunnel, at the core of Star Axis; the Solar Pyramid; the Shadow Field; the Equatorial Chamber, where you can see the stars that travel along the equator; and the Hour Chamber where you can view one hour of Earth’s rotation. All the angles in Star Axis are pulled down from star alignments into physical form and human scale. The Star Tunnel holds a stairway precisely aligned with Earth’s axis, so it frames the earth’s changing alignment to our north star, Polaris, over the 26,000-year astronomical cycle called “precession.”

Rail: I think I need a class in—how shall I say it?—“precession for dummies.” In other words, is there a relatively straightforward way you can explain precession and how it lies at the heart of how Star Axis is physically structured? Maybe start from something we all know from those globes that were in grade school classrooms, showing how the Earth is tilted at a certain angle, which we refer to as the Earth’s axis?

Ross: The Earth’s axis projected out into space becomes the celestial axis. It marks the celestial pole, the point in space that all the stars revolve around.

Rail: Celestial axis. See? I’ve already gotten it wrong. Well, if you extend the line that we call the Earth’s axis into celestial space, what happens?

Ross: Think of it this way: the Earth’s axis is wobbling in a circular motion like the axis of a spinning top. Currently it points to our north star, Polaris. Over 26,000 years, the axis will slowly shift to point to other regions of the sky and different stars will become north stars.

Rail: The word wobble is throwing me off. Because it sounds like something is moving at the moment. When you say, “the Earth’s wobble,” you just mean change in its movement?

Ross: Like the axis of a spinning top. The Earth is doing that, except in slow motion.

Rail: Meaning that’s why the axis will point a little differently to the stars over time?

Ross: Yes. You can walk through this cycle of time in the Star Tunnel and experience a connection to Earth’s axis and its projection out into space. In 2100 AD, the axis will be precisely aligned with Polaris. Over the next 13,000 years, Polaris will appear to spiral out in larger and larger circles around the pole. About 13,000 years from now—as it was about 13,000 years ago—Vega, one of the brightest stars in the sky, will be the north star, but not in as perfect an alignment as Polaris is now.

Rail: In other words, what we want to call the “north star” isn’t always the same celestial body, but rather a given star that happens to be in a particular relationship to the Earth’s axis? It’s Polaris now, but in some thousands of years in the future and in some thousands of years in the past, it is Vega functioning as the relevant reference point?

Ross: Right. What we now call—and have for a long time—the “north star,” Polaris, is simply the star that’s as close to where the Earth’s axis points in the sky for this particular time we’re in.

Rail: Got it—I think, anyway. But what does all this have to do with Star Axis?

Ross: That’s the conceptual core of Star Axis, that you experience different layers of time as you move through the sculpture. For instance, in the Hour Chamber you can see the earth turning as the stars move from one side of its triangular opening to the other over the course of an hour. As you approach the Star Tunnel there’s a passageway with walls built in stone that opens to frame the circle that the earth’s axis wobbles in. The Star Tunnel stairs are aligned with Earth’s axis, and at the top there’s a circular aperture that frames the celestial pole. As you climb the stairs, this aperture frames larger and larger circles of sky. Each of these circles frames a particular orbit of Polaris in the 26,000-year cycle of precession. The stairs are dated to identify the years—past, present, and future.

Rail: Ok, so it takes you 147 stairs to get from 2100 AD at the bottom to 15,000 AD at the top—but because the cycle of precession is 26,000 years, then at the top, you are not just seeing what it will look like in 15,000 AD, but also what the pole star’s range was in 11,000 BC? In other words, you are going back in time as well as into the future?

Ross: Yes, the stairs are dated both backwards and forwards in time to capture the full cycle. It’s a ten-story staircase with no landings. Each stair is dated to identify the year Polaris will turn in the circle framed by the aperture seen from that particular stair.

Rail: What you’ve done in providing a physical structure for this phenomenon therefore seems to reveal something we will never live long enough to see. As you ascend, you are in a way going both backwards in time and forwards in time. Conceptually and experientially, Star Axis almost seems to merge past, present, and future as you move through the space.

Ross: Definitely. You got it.

Rail: But what does that do to our concept of time?

Ross: Well, space, light, and time all come together in the Star Tunnel. Space and time are intertwined. The more effort you make as you climb up the stairs, the further forward and backward in time you go.

Rail: I recognize that you can describe all this mathematically, but it seems that the point of Star Axis is to provide some experiential sense of the changing nature of these celestial relationships over time as one moves through the created space.

Ross: That’s correct. And the way I got involved in this project is that in 1971, I’d gotten a preview of Peter Tompkins’s book Secrets of the Great Pyramid, which was all about the mathematics of the pyramids. I was fascinated by the math. I started drawing the star alignments, and that’s when I discovered precession. I realized I had to build Star Axis when I discovered that this large astronomical cycle has a human scale.

Interestingly, we see the concept of precession in culture, where it is known by observing the changing of the ages. These are now changing from Pisces to Aquarius—hence, we hear of “the dawning of the age of Aquarius.” Around the time I started building Star Axis I created a series of large star map paintings, “Mansions of the Zodiac” (1973–76/2012), inspired by how Earth changes its alignment to the stars through the twelve ages. I’ll be exhibiting these works at the Harwood Museum in 2025.

Rail: You’re speaking again about how the current alignment of the axis with Polaris will shift from being very closely aligned—so that it can be sighted within a circle the size of a dime at arm’s length—to a more expanded perimeter, and then slowly back again.

Ross: Yes. When I realized that this star, Polaris, is actually pulsing in the human visual field over the course of 26,000 years—from a circle smaller than a dime held at arm’s length in the year 2100, to its largest orbit, encompassing your entire field of vision in 15,100—I thought: “Wow! An enormous star cycle pulsing in the human visual field. It’s not good enough to just know about this, I want to walk through it and see what it feels like.” And that was the impetus for building Star Axis.

Rail: Well, the drive to do so has impelled you for over fifty years.

Ross: It started out simpler. It was going to be a staircase up the side of a mountain with a metal ring at the top that would frame Polaris.

Rail: It sounds as though you wouldn’t have been satisfied with that.

Ross: I get a lot of my information from dreams. In the early sixties, I was building lattice sculptures you could see through because I was interested in transparency. One night in 1965, around Thanksgiving, I dreamed of engineering plans for how to build a large-scale prism. I soon cleared out the old sculpture in my studio and started building prisms. Michael Heizer wrote my “obituary” on this occasion, speaking about the death of my aesthetic origins and the birth of new ideas. It was a decisive moment that got me involved with light and planetary motion.

But back to Star Axis. The crew and I were putting in the foundations for a staircase that would ascend the side of a mesa in New Mexico, when for thirty consecutive days, every morning, I woke up with this mantra running in my head: “You have to enter the Earth to reach the stars. You have to enter the Earth to reach the stars.” Over and over. So after thirty days, I thought, “Okay, I get it. I have to push the staircase back into the mountain.” Bucky [Buckminster] Fuller sent me a note saying that this was akin to his concept: “you have to go in, to go out.” Then I decided to expand the scale of Star Axis by incorporating the other four large elements into the sculpture framing different layers of time.

Rail: Why is it that you have to have the staircase embedded or slotted into the side of the mesa in order to make Star Axis work?

Ross: It congealed the whole idea: “entering the earth to reach the stars.” But it also added fifteen years to the construction, because we had to excavate through solid rock. Ultimately, expanding the scale of Star Axis added decades of time and millions of dollars.

Rail: Clearly. I just have to ask: were you a relatively normal kid?

Ross: I was a science nerd.

Rail: Were you envisioning things like this as a kid, having dreams about work you might do?

Ross: I used to build things. I was very interested in nature. When I was a teenager, I helped run a bird sanctuary outside of Philadelphia. And I started the science club in high school. I wasn’t that interested in art until my senior year at UC Berkeley studying mathematics. I was forced to make up two units of liberal arts in order to graduate. I chose a sculpture class because I thought it would be easy. A year later I was out of the math department and fully enrolled in the MFA program in sculpture.

Rail: But the fascination on the relationship between the heavens and Earth, and the stars that we move in—was that something from early on?

Ross: It came later from my work with prisms and the solar spectrum, but I was always very interested in mathematics and physics.

Rail: Not astronomy as such?

Ross: No, simply math. When you go into advanced math, the most important thing they hammer into you is that you need to become very good at precisely defining your questions. It’s one of the most valuable things I know, and I still use it all the time. Precise questions lead to precise observations.

Rail: And Star Axis does give the impression of great mathematical precision and stability. As I understand it, when you stand on a given stair in the Star Tunnel that’s incised with a particular date, you experience a visual field indicating where the stars were and will be vis-à-vis the Earth’s axis at that point in the 26,000 year cycle. And then you go up another stair and there is another date and a larger visual field indicating the relationships of the axis to the stars in that field. So when you get to the top of the steps, if I understand correctly, you’ll see what a sector of the heavens looked like 13,000 years ago and what they will look like 13,000 years from now.

Ross: Yes. You walk through the historical increments. You see what the movement of Polaris is now, and what it will be in the distant past and future, how it moved for Nefertiti or Plato or when the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776.

Rail: That doesn’t leave a lot of room for uncertainty, does it?

Ross: Well, as it turns out, the dates get a little more uncertain when you get toward the top. Dating the stairs is very precise except for the effect that Earth’s sloshing molten core has on its movements further out in time. I learned this in about 2017, after the astronomy team I worked with, Woody [Woodruff] Sullivan and his grad students at the University of Washington, Seattle, had spent two years dating the stairs. They were about to send me the dates when the Naval Observatory called them to say: “you’ve got a problem.” The folks at the Observatory had just realized that while they can predict the slosh of the Earth’s core out for the next three to four thousand years, they can’t do it with certainty for the entire 13,000 years. The dates are going to get fuzzier as you get further out in time and further up the Star Tunnel stairs. This is now all incorporated in the stair dating.

Rail: This would’ve made John Cage happy, wouldn’t it?

Ross: We all decided it was pretty cool. This summer we’re finishing the last major element of Star Axis, the Shadow Field. It’s a bowtie-shaped field in front of the Solar Pyramid, drawn by the tip of the Solar Pyramid’s shadow throughout the course of the year from solstice to solstice.

Rail: Is it like a giant sundial, but on a seasonal rather than hourly or daily basis?

Ross: It’s about capturing the shape of time drawn by the Solar Pyramid’s shadow. The Shadow Field is two city blocks across and a city block wide. It’s defined by sandstone curbs, and it will be covered with white caliche so that the shadow is in high contrast. It will also capture the moon’s shadow at night. The sun’s shadow is short in the summer and long in the winter, whereas the full moon’s shadow is the opposite, long in the summer and short in the winter. So, you have this mirroring of sun and moon seen on the Shadow Field.

Rail: So that the shadow is clearly delineated on the white surface?

Ross: Yes, yes. Caliche is a white chalk-like clay native to New Mexico. What interested me about capturing this shadow is that every telephone pole, fence post, and corner of every building draw this form on the ground twice a year. It’s just that you never see it. A lot of my work is about making visible forms and structures that are contained in light.

Rail: Is there an optimal time during a given month to experience Star Axis? Would it be at the time of the full moon?

Ross: Well, it depends on what you’d like to see. For viewing the stars, it’s better if the moon is zero. For viewing the lunar shadow moving across the Shadow Field, it’s better to visit when there’s a full moon.

Rail: There are different monumental structures around the globe that seem to have a relationship to, or portray, or perhaps reveal—in your words—our relationships with the surrounding heavens, the planets, the stars, and the Earth itself.

Ross: Yes.

Rail: The Egyptian pyramids are embedded in people’s imagination in that regard. Stonehenge is embedded in people’s imagination. The Temple of the Sun in Machu Picchu is likewise. So are the Mayan temples. Have you been thinking about how Star Axis will be understood or thought of in one thousand years, in five thousand years, or ten thousand years? Do you think people will wonder: “what is this?”

Ross: No, I don’t really think about that, but I do think about those cultures who had the impulse to build these structures. For me, it’s about standing at the boundary between Earth and sky and seeing what that feels like.

Rail: But even so, do you have a sense of the future time of Star Axis?

Ross: I’m very aware of its immediate future. I built it, but I’m not going to be the gatekeeper. I was given the passion and the energy to build it. I never got bored. I kept discovering new alignments and incorporating them into the architecture. But Star Axis won’t be open to the public until we can partner with an institution that can run it.

Rail: This has been a good, long discussion, and super informative for me, as I think it will be for our readers. But before we close, and given the upcoming show at the Getty, can you give a brief sense of what people can expect when they go there to see the installation that is part of Lumen? We’ve gotten a sense of what the experience could be at Star Axis.

Ross: I’m not really directing the experience anyone will have while moving through the solar spectrums at the Getty. What I am doing is presenting a solar radiance that you can walk through. There will be big shafts of solar color cast down onto the floor in the open rotunda and some activity on the walls, but most of the shafts of light will hit the floor, so you’ll be able to walk through them. You’ll be lit up by the spectrum colors. And people who pay careful attention may be able to feel the different colors of light on their skin. The different colors have different energies in them—you can actually feel the difference between red and blue and yellow when you stand in a large spectrum. But people just need to walk through the space to discover how the light affects them.

Rail: So you have no specific kind of experience you want people to have?

Ross: No, no, no.

Rail: But you do at Star Axis. You’re not limiting it, but there are some things that you want people to experience. I mean, it’s built for that.

Ross: It’s my belief, after working for many years with light, that we have a genetic memory of our relationship to light. The spectrums cast by my large prisms can wake that up. The Star Tunnel at Star Axis can wake it up as well. At the bottom of the Star Tunnel, you see Polaris, our pole star, sitting on the rim of the aperture at the top of the stairs. One of the magical things at Star Axis is that as you climb the stairs, Polaris appears to move toward the center of the aperture. The star appears to be centering itself for you. Of course, the star is not moving, it’s just that the field around it is becoming larger and larger. I’ve seen astronomers do a double take when experiencing this.

Rail: I think that’s as strong an invitation to visit and experience Star Axis for oneself as I can imagine. So maybe it’s a funny question to close this interview, but what do you do to relax? Walk the dog, cook—or just sit and read and stare at the heavens?

Ross: I read, I watch films, I walk the dogs. In New Mexico, I get to watch the light sweep across the land. I meditate every day.

Rail: It’s been a fifty-year meditation.

Ross: It has, but I’ve also done a lot of other work along the way.