NEW WELLS FARGO SCULPTURE CONNECTS LIGHT AND THE STARS

Charles Ross was talking about light.

“I believe we’re very intimately connected with light on a cellular level,” said Ross, a New York City sculptor. His elemental sculpture, “Light, Rock and Water,” was presented to San Diegans in a private ceremony Thursday.

“If you’re put in a position of having a direct experience of looking at light itself--not looking at a painting about light, but at light--you know that you know it. . . .

“Carl Sagan said that we are star stuff that has taken its destiny into its own hands. We’re made out of the same chemical structure of stars. I really think that cells remember their connection to the stars.”

The Center City Development Corp.’s Arts Advisory Board chose Ross to create a work for the Wells Fargo Plaza at Broadway and Front Street. Ross was educated at UC Berkeley, where he studied mathematics and physics before earning a master’s degree in sculpture.

Gerald Hirshberg, chairman of the advisory board, said the board had sought for the site an artist whose work was “more ephemeral.” Hirshberg said the Ross sculpture is “about the beauty of science and the science of beauty.”

The art of Charles Ross is indeed about light and the cosmos. “Light, Rock and Water,” Ross’ “prism wall” sculpture, seems tailor-made for a city that’s committed to space exploration, the hard sciences, research and discovery.

On Thursday, passers-by could not resist the sculpture’s angled wings of clear acrylic prisms. The prisms are 9 1/2 feet long and 8 feet high. They are installed on a polished granite pedestal that rises from a black-tiled pool of water.

The prisms are connected by an orange top plate to a tall block of rough-cut granite that stands 18 feet away. Seen from offices high in the Wells Fargo Building, the sculpture resembles an orange lightning bolt.

“I wanted to plug people into a direct experience of how their environment is structured in light, so you can actually perceive it, instead of contemplate it,” Ross said of his sculpture.

“Look through the prism and you see the color structure of the environment,” he said. “As people walk closer and closer, the image gets crisper. As they move away, the image separates into the colors it’s made of . . . .

“Color is the messenger of the stars. Everything we know about the stars through telescopes is through the spectrum. All the information about stars in outer space is gathered by analyzing the spectrum itself. Here you can experience that same connection live.”

The second thing Ross is interested in is spatial relationships. Through the prisms, a person walking appears to be in two different spaces, moving at two different speeds and in two directions.

Lounging on a bench and watching people pass behind the prisms, Ross said, “Einstein’s relativity thought experiments had to do with the same observer standing in two places simultaneously--being able to stand here and there and see the same event. You can see that in this (artwork). When you see (the images) walking in two different directions at two different speeds, you’re really seeing two different events.

“That’s part of the reason in court trials witnesses are always telling different stories. If you stand in a different place, you always see a different event. This allows you to stand in two places at the same time.”

“Light, Rock and Water” was originally scheduled for completion in 1984 but was delayed by difficulaties with its installation. Originally budgeted for $125,000, the cost of providing additional structural support for the heavy sculpture, which stands above a parking garage, boosted the cost of the piece, which measures about 12 feet high by 50 feet long, to $177,000.

The idea for a new downtown sculpture was conceived in 1983 by arts patron Danah Fayman, who contributed $50,000. The remaining money came from the Koll Co.; Intereal, a partner in the Wells Fargo building; Lasalle Partners Inc., which later bought out Intereal; the Centre City Development Corp., and the Rogers & Wells law firm, which has offices in the building.

Ross, whose studio is in Manhattan, began working with light after a dream in 1965. “I dreamed the plans for how to build a very large prism--actually a set of engineering drawings, which worked out all the complexities and technical difficulties,” he said.

At the time, he had been working with wooden beams and welded steel. The dream was an epiphany. “It just sort of snapped me into another mode of perception. I threw out the other stuff. I guess it was time to move.”

Selected three years ago by the CCDC Arts Advisory Board for the San Diego site, Ross has recently installed two of his light-oriented sculptures in Dallas and Kansas City, Mo., and has commissions for spectrum projections to be installed this year in the San Francisco and Anchorage, Alaska, airports.

Ross’ largest project is “Star Axis,” an 11-story, quarter-mile-wide earth sculpture begun 10 years ago on a mesa east of Albuquerque, N.M.

While the nation has been making great strides in the exploration of the cosmos, Ross feels that art has remained earthbound.

“We’ve looked at the rings of Uranus, floated men in space and sent men to the moon. But where do you see any evidence of that? Somehow the art and architecture we have is 50 years behind our exploration. It’s too earthbound,” he said.

“I think (mankind) has been having trouble making connections. We’re so busy gathering information. We have to have a synthesis or all that information is worthless. I think art has a role in that. I’m somewhat disturbed that art isn’t leading us into that. Art is too self-conscious. It’s looking backward.

“My hope is this work will make people start thinking about light and space in ways that take you . . . to a connection with a larger order of the environment.”

Ross watched as a pigeon flapped and hovered above the orange top plate. “It’s trying to decide if it’s going to make the first mark on my art,” Ross said. The bird eyed the sculpture, then decided to fly on.