Surf’s Up at Parrish Art Museum

The Platform series at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill provides an occasion for individual artists to consider the entire museum over a period of months as a location for interdisciplinary artworks and installations. Starting on Sunday, the museum will become a site for Clifford Ross, a multimedia artist known for transcending the boundaries of photography and inventing both cameras and a unique method of printing photographs on wood.

Mr. Ross has chosen the exterior south wall of the building, the interior entrance lobby, and locations within the collection galleries for his mixed-media installation “Light | Waves,” which consists of “Digital Waves” and “Hurricane Waves on Wood.” Both works reflect his longstanding fascination with the water off the coast of Long Island.

“Digital Waves” is a computer-generated, artificially recreated environment that encourages viewers to immerse themselves in a virtual ocean and experience moving waves from different points of view. The museum’s lobby will contain an 18 by 18 foot L.E.D. wall, and the exterior will be illuminated by two 50-foot-wide L.E.D. walls facing Montauk Highway.

“Hurricane Waves on Wood” features six large-scale prints of photographs from Mr. Ross’s “Hurricane Waves” series digitally printed on sheets of hand-selected, matching maple veneer using ultraviolet cured ink and a commercial printer. Each work measures 12 by 19 feet. The artist selected the wood for the liveliness of its grain and warm color, with the result that the viewer experiences both the drama of the image and the nature of the material on which it is printed.

The “Hurricane Waves” photographs, which have been widely exhibited and published in a book by M.I.T. Press, were captured by Mr. Ross by positioning himself in the surf during several hurricanes, wearing a wetsuit and flotation vest while tethered to an assistant on the shore. He made most of the images at Georgica Beach in East Hampton over a 12-year period.

Mr. Ross has also created photographic series of mountains, woods, and other locations in the United States and abroad, as well as abstract photographic images. A man of many talents, in 2002 he also invented and patented the R1, a still camera that uses film to capture images with more than 500 times the resolution of the digital point-and-shoot camera. Three years later, he invented the R2, a high-resolution digital video camera.

In conjunction with the exhibition, which has been organized by Corinne Ermi, the museum’s curator of special projects, the museum will present several public programs, including, on Sept. 22, talks and workshops about water and climate change with members of the art and scientific communities. The exhibition will remain on view through Oct. 15.