My Afternoon With a Charles Ross

A drive to Dwan Light Sanctuary at the United World College, Montezuma, New Mexico

“Light is everything.” Don’t tell that to someone on the brink of spiritual bankruptcy. It wouldn’t be kind.

I’m going to be honest and say I was having a tough time at the beginning of 2025. The magazine I had given my soul to for 19 years was closing up, I had been prepared to captain that ship into a new era, and for the first time since I was 15 I didn’t have a job. So I did what most people would do in need of a spiritual awakening: I drove 15 hours to Taos, New Mexico. I think this is what artists for over a century have been doing, heading to the high desert of Northern New Mexico to see what I can only describe as the greatest, most expansive skies I have ever seen and a landscape that was both alien and incredibly fucking honest and real. It made sense that this was the land of Agnes Martin and Larry Bell, that Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keeffe had been influenced by this landscape.

I’m going to admit I just really wanted to eat, swim, and stare at stars and not think about art at all. I think I was at my almost absolute limit. I had seen so much of my career become overtaken by the talking-head social media lecturing circuit of “what is wrong with the art world” that I just thought I was going to quit. I wasn’t going to quit and move to Taos per se, because I have heard that it’s the city that traps you, that it’s hard to get out of even when you want to. I was more so going to see the sky and think of something else to do. Someone else to be. I think since the pandemic, and even before then, I had spent 19 straight years working and I didn’t really take much time off, I wasn’t afforded it, and I thought a week in New Mexico would do me good. It was D.H. Lawrence who wrote The Woman Who Rode Away in New Mexico in 1924, and though last time I checked I wasn’t a woman, I was thinking a bit of what riding away could do for me. (There was a line in Rode Away that reads, “Why don’t we stay in love that way all our lives? Why do we turn into corpses with consciousness?”, and I’m going to be honest, although that hits pretty hard for someone looking for a life change at 43, and I probably wouldn’t dare tell anyone after I lost my job that I was reading lines like this out loud, this wasn’t what I was completely going for, but let’s digress on how incredible that line is another time.)

So, we are on the road. To New Mexico. And a friend that we were going to meet there was going to introduce us to Larry Bell as a non-work-related studio visit, which felt like reason enough to go to Taos via Santa Fe for a few days. Land Art, I want to start here, is something I pretty much only know through the Dia Art Foundation, and when you get into the Southwest, you assume you are really close to all the famed works of De Maria, Smithson, and Holt, or that magically you will be invited to Turrell’s Roden Crater just by driving by, but you won’t be. Everything is really, really far away. Bell of course is associated with Light and Space, but I’ve always just thought in my head that Light and Space artists and the ones who spend 50 years working on some magically spiritual work in the desert are akin to each other, peers of some sort. I think they just kinda get that art can take you places on Earth that make you feel like you have been taken to outer space.

Anyway, once we got into Taos, we got into a conversation about what art we could see in the high desert that might reenergize how we looked at art. I think I was feeling a bit burnt out, but we were in a central location where within a few hours’ drive there was always going to be some sort of art installation that would be interesting to look at. I wanted an escape. Taos is a vortex where you can’t escape, but I wasn’t bound to it, so let’s move. Our friend mentioned the Dwan Light Sanctuary, Charles Ross’s installation on the campus of United World College, a few hours away. I did a quick search: “Envisioned and inspired by Virginia Dwan as a place for quiet contemplation, the Dwan Light Sanctuary is a collaboration between Virginia Dwan, Charles Ross, and Laban Wingert. Each of Ross’s 24 large scale prisms is specifically aligned with the sun to project different spectrum events for every season. The spectrums evolve throughout the day as they move through the space propelled by the turning of the Earth.” Turning Earth? Quiet contemplation? Spectrums? I’m down.

The UWC was founded in 1982 with some financial support from Armand Hammer — and, ironically, we had just listened to a Louis Theroux podcast interview with Armie Hammer, so like, I’m feeling the vibes. We are present in the alignment of the turning Earth, my friends. Think of it as a very advanced high school for kids to attend top universities. At the entry gate, during what I could only assume was spring break, a very thoughtful and mild-mannered guard gave us directions to the Dwan Light Sanctuary, which rested on a hill just above the campus. You drive up a dirt road to reach the structure itself, which seems fitting for a place billed as “where sun, moon, and stars align.”

I read more. “The Dwan Light Sanctuary serves the UWC-USA campus and the public as a refuge from the pace, conflicts, and anxieties of daily living. The site was selected to capitalize upon the spectacular northern New Mexico light. The orientation and geometry of the building are derived from its alignment to the sun, moon, and stars. Projecting from a circular core are two apses each containing six large prisms mounted in sloping windows to capture light rays from sunrise to sunset.”

You are probably at this point wondering what the fuck I was walking into. Well, me too. I had been to the Turrell spaces, which, really, never get old and are some of the most fantastic spaces to sit in. But they tend to be really, really crowded. They aren’t really spaces of quiet contemplation, but sort of controlling your emotions to not be annoyed about being in public. It’s like a test of wills. But this was different. The stone structure that we walked into, nearly 40 feet wide and 30 feet tall, was empty. It was just the three of us. And we all sort of kept quiet and found our spaces to sit (there were benches) and we watched the prisms do their magic. There was a piano, and we took turns playing it (some better than others) and the incredible reverberation of the space made it feel like a concert in a grand hall. The Earth moved, the colors moved.

Solar spectrum artist Charles Ross and architect Laban Wingert designed the space to almost feel holy, but mostly what I sort of got from it was that it was a space that shows you that you’re on a rock moving through space. Through the universe. Through time. The New York Times did a major feature last week on Ross and his own half-century-long project, Star Axis, which is about to open in a distant, remote location in New Mexico, with the writer noting so eloquently, “While Ross’s attention to detail is often stunning, he’s more interested in conveying a bodily impression of cosmic time. My encounter was certainly more esoteric than scientific.”

I can relate. I felt most compelled by the fact that I was watching time, cosmic time, pass and how much of that attention to detail within myself felt calming. And what I got from the experience is that, although I found my day in New Mexico to be privileged in that I had time to do it, it was free. The space was free. The time was mine. The day was ours. There was something about an artist and architect giving their experiments and expertise to a greater experience of something universally fascinating: our place in space. It didn’t require IMAX, it didn’t require an algorithm, it didn’t ask you for admission, it didn’t tell you it was an “experience,” it wasn’t an ice cream museum, it wasn’t waiting in line for a matcha or a bagel; it was watching the Earth move. And it moved me.

So why am I writing this? If you open that app right now, the ol’ IG/TikTok, all you hear about is market, market, market. The down sales. The layoffs. The mood. And I was part of that. I lost a job and started The Unibrow to recapture my initial spirit of seeing art through a collective lens — that it’s not just for the wealthy to own, the elite to admire, the “cultured” to understand, but about how to sit with something greater than yourself and react to and experience it without discrimination. I don’t know anything about the construction or the vision of the Dwan as a concept, but I do know that I could experience it in real time and watch rainbow patterns dance all around the space for a few hours and be transported to somewhere other. That is the power and purpose of art.

Charles Ross sort of reignited something for me, which I think is the point of so many of these rooms, but as a writer, it moved me to rethink my relationship to what I wanted to do next. To take more time. To make things that last, that talk about something lasting, to connect the dots between lived experience and history. To make one brow, so to speak.

“Light is everything,” Charles said in an interview with The Brooklyn Rail in 2024. And I think I kind of understand what he means now. —Evan Pricco