Clifford Ross: Through the Looking Glass

Much like Alice Liddell in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, multimedia artist Clifford Ross looks beyond the natural world to uncover another world bound only by the imagination, in which images are reversed and landscapes reimagined in ravishing color. A digital visionary, Ross uses methods old and new to produce exceptionally beautiful and radically redesigned conceptions of reality.

In 2009, Ross was commissioned in collaboration with the fine art manufacturers at Franz Mayer of Munich to create a monumental public art project for the US Federal Courthouse in Austin, Texas. The culmination of this collaboration is a colorful twenty-eight-foot-square stained glass wall with built-in hydraulic doors opening into a large event space. This book documents the long process, which brought together architects, engineers, craftsmen, and government officials and combined centuries-old construction techniques with twenty-first-century digital technology.

With one hundred full-color illustrations from all phases of the wall’s design and construction, ranging from photographs to pencil sketches and computer renderings, this book charts the creation of a modern monument.