Clifford Ross: Mountain Redux

At a certain point, you know, years into working on the mountains, it was a very slow process, I felt that we had achieved the goal I had, which was to make that mountain available in an artistic way to people with these high resolution images.

Once you've achieved something, if you just keep doing it, it's not art making, there's no challenge. I wanted to get away from my five years of work about realism and get to that ecstatic truth, and that was the beginning of Mountain Redux

We drained all the color, we then flipped it into a negative and began obsessively printing in different ways to figure out whether we could make an object, an image, that somehow or other spoke to my experience of the mountain but didn't try to mimic the mountain.

And frankly the story of Mountain Redux is just going down the rabbit hole, I mean down the rabbit hole, through the mirror, any way you want to look at it.

I went as far as I could into my fantasy. We're still going to reconfigure my experience of the mountain, but with the irony of using basically using one still image to make many many images, and at this point, to make something that I call a photographic opera.

I found I needed to get into the medium that I was working with, as I had with the Grain series relative to the Hurricanes and the Horizons.

I had learned a lot form in collaborating with the team in the studio about how to break apart these images to make them and make them look realistic. Now I wanted to use that skill set and my understanding of what these images were to create a poetic equivalent to the mountain, rather than a realistic one.

So what I did, is I began to re-deploy my capabilities in the digital domain with the mountain into fulfilling my fantasies about the mountain, my reactions to it. We began to make things which looked so remarkable in animation that I began to think about number one, using some of the still moments that I saw on the screen  in animation as the building blocks for still images.

It was a remarkable reversal. Instead of studying the mountain, I was studying the fantasy land that we had deployed across the flat screen of moving pieces that we had created from the mountain.