Perhaps no other city in the world has witnessed a growth in its arts scene over the past decade or so like Los Angeles. If you’re interested in art in Los Angeles, you likely already know about The Broad and Hauser & Wirth. But there’s a vast array of smaller galleries and places to engage with art across the city—here’s a look at just a few of our favorites off the beaten track. Billed as the first survey of Asian American artists at a major Los Angeles contemporary art museum, “Scratching at the Moon” gathers the work of 13 artists in Los Angeles over the last five decades. The show (on view through July 28) began, in part, as a response to the increase in attacks on Asian Americans in 2020, amid false rhetoric about the pandemic. Across many mediums, the works confront identity formation, immigration, cultural assimilation, gentrification, family dynamics, and much more.

Michelle Lopez’s “Correctional Lighting” (2024) is one of two massive sculptures that greet the viewer as they enter Scratching at the Moon at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA), an intergenerational exhibition of 13 Asian American artists with strong ties to Los Angeles. The demand coined by scholar Susette Min as an "extra-aesthetic demand" requires that race-specific exhibitions do the extra labor of being a site of conversations around the role race still plays in the larger selection and valuation of art at the institutional level. Amanda Ross-Ho’s work is an homage to her father, the artist Ruyell Ho. For “Untitled Prop Archive (THE PORTFOLIO),” she gathered dozens of objects from her father’s commercial photography portfolio and spread them across a comically oversized wooden table. Nearby is “Untitled Waste Image (HEAVY DUTY)” (both works 2023), a lightbox that contains an enlarged, water-damaged photograph of her father that Ross-Ho found among his archives. The colors and distortions from the water damage create beautiful painterly passages that call attention to the way time and memory warp our perceptions of relationships.

Anonymous Was A Woman, the grant-making nonprofit that has awarded over $7 million to women-identifying artists since 1996, has named the 15 winners of its 2023 grants. Each recipient will receive an unrestricted prize of $25,000 each. “This year’s nominations were particularly impressive,” artist and AWAW founder Susan Unterberg, who does not sit on the jury, told ARTnews. “Hopefully, the world will see more of their work in the coming years. The winners are a really exciting group, not completely unknown if you look at their resumes, but I would say they are unknown to most people—their names aren’t getting big prices and they aren’t the ones we hear about, which seems to skew the idea that women aren’t doing so well.” More information on each winner can be found on the AWAW website.

How is the transient experience of being a young woman captured and preserved? The memories tied up in the experience of girlhood and how young women express their identity and autonomy are explored in the Henry Art Gallery’s exhibition, “Double Dare Ya: Burns, Kurland, & Ross-Ho.” Running Feb. 4 through May 29, “Double Dare Ya” is a new exhibit in the Henry’s ongoing “Viewpoints” series, in which members of the UW community are encouraged to join the discourse on the artwork being exhibited. The “Viewpoints” series is organized by Nina Bozicnik, the assistant curator, and Kira Sue, a graduate curatorial assistant.

Mary Mary is pleased to present HURTS WORST, Amanda Ross-Ho’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The show will feature a suite of new large scale textile assemblages, and a group of small text-based paintings.

The exhibition also included six aluminum sculptures of clock hands hung near the gallery's entrance and, in the center of the space, two broad white tables covered with all manner of paraphernalia one might find in a studio, or in a carry-on bag: coins, X-Acto knife blades, scrunchies, gloves, wine glasses, and sleep masks. As she had done in previous work, Ross-Ho played with scale in this arrangement by including exaggeratedly large or miniaturized versions of some of the objects, such as jumbo paper clips and tiny beverage bottles. 

‘Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day.’ That stoner koan from the 1987 comedy Withnail & I floated into my mind while looking at Amanda Ross-Ho’s solo show at Mitchell Innes & Nash. Twelve large clock faces, scrawled with colourful brush-marks, and pencilled notes-to-self, line the walls. The dials are missing their hands. These are hung in a forlorn line, each set to half-past six, near the entrance to the show. If the clock faces tell us that time is one subject of Ross-Ho’s show, then the dirty, outsized wine glasses, cups, forks, art materials and tools scattered across two big tables in the centre of the gallery tell us that scale is her other topic.

In some regards, size has always mattered to Amanda Ross-Ho. It’s hard to even recall a show of hers in which she hasn’t taken a common object and enlarged it to an uncommon size. In her 2012 show at MOCA’s Pacific Design Center, Teeny Tiny Woman, Ross-Ho even went so far as to create an oversize photo enlarger, underscoring her impressive sense of both scale and formal wit. With several years of practice under her belt since then, however, Ross-Ho’s simple enlargements have seemed to evolve quite considerably, perhaps best exemplified by My Pen is Huge, Ross-Ho’s new exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, which sees her adding to own work’s discourse by including life size objects alongside her oversized sculptures.

Los Angeles-based artist Amanda Ross-Ho has built a career focusing on the studio as locus, metaphor, and container for the creative process. Keeping her interests tethered to this line of inquiry has given her the freedom to cover a swath of art practices including sculpture, painting, photography, installation, and performance. In MY PEN IS HUGE, she gives us a book of hours aimed not at religious devotion but rather devotion to creativity, parsed into minute snippets of time.

“MY PEN IS HUGE” was absolutely perfect as a title because it did about 15 things at the same time. Language has this ability to do what I want my work to always be able to do, which is to have an elasticity and mutability. I loved the redundancy of naming what was actually happening in the show—which is about scaling my own mark-making larger. Also it’s obviously a piece of wordplay that’s supposed to fool you, this quick joke. And then it’s specifically about male arrogance, and the fallibility of it.

Last summer, around the time she lost the lease on her downtown-Los Angeles studio of nearly a decade, Ross-Ho found a collection of paper clock faces being unloaded by their manufacturer on eBay. These handless invocations of disorientation and eternity became her work surfaces and scratch pads until this past August, which she spent in the gallery painstakingly reproducing them as four-and-a-half-foot-square paintings. One is covered with doodled cubes, masks of tragedy, and hasty ballpoint notes like “Avoid grinding over steaming pots”; in another, the clock face is simply painted red. Along with an installation of novelty-sized objects both store-bought and custom-made—giant wineglasses, minuscule bottles of Evian water—the work suggests a powerfully unnerving vision of time as a procession of banal decisions adding up to something irrevocable. Six sets of large powder-coated clock hands hanging on the front wall make a fitting addendum.

Amanda Ross-Ho’s show, “My Pen is Huge,” is like jumping through a rabbit hole and into a world where the gallery, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, has become a mad theater. The oversized wine glasses, blown-up hands of grandfather clocks, and other random objects are feel somehow completely necessary in the room. Coffee stains and pen scribbles cover the canvas and tables in the middle of the gallery. This show completely captures chaos in its most whimsical form.

In the weeks leading up to her current exhibition, MY PEN IS HUGE, at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Amanda Ross-Ho prepared for the show in the gallery space in which her work would be on display. Poet and art writer John Yau visited her during this process.

In an exhibition created within the walls of its display place, Los Angeles-based artist Amanda Ross-Ho installs (and creates) her latest exhibits at the Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery in New York. This hyperbole heavy exhibition, consisting of installations, sculptures and paintings, is called ‘MY PEN IS HUGE’.

A conceptual artist known for incorporating her studio activities in a theatrical, multidisciplinary practice, Los Angeles artist Amanda Ross-Ho created her latest exhibit, titled "MY PEN IS HUGE," right in Chelsea's Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery. 

Los Angeles-based artist Amanda Ross-Ho turned Mitchell-Innes & Nash into her studio for the month of August, working in the gallery to create new paintings and sculptures for her upcoming exhibition. The central motif will be the clock, featured in 12 large-scale paintings made last month based on drawings produced over the past year—compressing a year’s worth of work into just 31 days.

“I decided to use these surfaces as a place to record the relentless conscious, and subconscious, mark-making and stenography that takes place within my immediate and intimate personal tabletop spaces.” While working within her impromptu gallery-studio, Ross-Ho says she is “forensically translating” some of these studies into a dozen large-scale paintings. 

In summer 2016, Ross-Ho found a collection of vintage paper clock face dials on Ebay, being liquidated from a clock maker. She acquired all of them, identifying the poetic potential and a vacant stage for activity on the blank clock faces, which were amputated from the mechanism and components, she started a series of works that evolved across her travels. She aggregated the surfaces of the clock faces with doodles, calculations, diagrams, lists, notes to self and other anxious scribblings, combined with the residue of her consumption of food and drink, as a visual documentation of her daily activities of life and art.

To wit: For the new work of the Los Angeles-based artist Amanda Ross-Ho, “Untitled Findings (ACCESS),” she has scattered enlarged replicas of keys across Basel.

Ms. Ross-Ho’s exaggerated keys, modeled after functioning ones that open doors to real locations around the city, are almost certain to be come across by passers-by who had no expectation of a run-in with an Art Basel installation that day — chance encounters echoing the imagined accidents by which the keys were lost.

“I’ve been a big fan of Amanda Ross-Ho’s work for a long time. She makes large-scale sculptural interpretations of everyday objects, like gloves and trousers. In this vein, she’s made a keychain based on her own Carabiner keychain and a bunch of keys that seem to have fallen off and are lost throughout the streets of Basel. They’re large—maybe 60cm long. We partnered with people from the Parcours area and asked if they would You might find one down by the river, up the stairway on the other side of the road, in a private garden. give the artist a copy of their key. It makes a nice meta-portrait of the local community.” 

Miranda July speaks with fellow biennial alumni artists Edgar Arceneaux, Amanda Ross-Ho, and Catherine Opie to explain the survey and share their experiences with it. 

Looking at work by the artist Amanda Ross-Ho can feel a bit dizzying, and that might be something she’s going for. Since she moved to L.A., her art has become a lot about her studio practice, about creating a loop of the micro and macro aimed at giving viewers a sense of vertigo that makes them want to look closer, hyper-aware of their surroundings. Ross-Ho uses shifts in scale or material to jar us awake. 

A Public Art Fund production organized by the fund’s associate curator, Andria Hickey, the exhibition presents sculptures by seven artists who have all exhibited internationally. It’s meant to address a particular condition of modern life: On the one hand, technologically mediated imagery constantly impinges on us from every direction; on the other, images are perpetually being turned into real things, like fancy cars and tall buildings. The exhibition’s introductory text panel explains, “As images are rendered into objects, and objects are circulated as images, the boundaries between the physical and the virtual are blurred, challenging us to rethink how we see the world around us.”

“Image Objects,” on view through November 20, brings digital culture to City Hall Park in New York. Organized by Public Art Fund and curated by Andrea Hickey — who also put together the sprawling group show “Objects Food Rooms,” currently on view at Tanya Bonakdar — the exhibition riffs on the complex interplay between two- and three-dimensions, between the computer-generated and the supposedly “real.” The artists on view, including Jon Rafman, Amanda Ross-Ho, and Lothar Hempel, all probe these unique tensions, often mixing cutting-edge technologies with old-fashioned materials. (Rafman, for instance, uses computer modeling software to create forms that are then hewn from marble.) In a conversation via email, I spoke with Hickey about how our obsession with sharing images of art on social media platforms is changing creative culture.

Amanda Ross-Ho's current show at L.A. MOCA's Pacific Design Center (PDC), "TEENY TINY WOMAN" [through Sept. 23], reinterprets the retrospective. Presented with the opportunity to survey her practice, the L.A.-based artist has chosen to reconfigure motifs from her practice, and display them in mutated forms on 17 large-scale Sheetrock panels made to represent, to scale, the perimeter of her downtown studio.

“TEENY TINY WOMAN” is the first solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles by Amanda Ross-Ho. On view at the MoCA Pacific Design Center from June 23 to September 23, this show finds Ross-Ho characteristically spanning the disciplines of sculpture, photography, collage, and installation in a deliberately self-referential project that draws from and remixes her own output and artistic history of the past several years.

Amanda Ross-Ho presents a photo diary of personal vignettes.
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THIS LONG CENTURY is an ever-evolving collection of personal insights from artists, authors, filmmakers, musicians and cultural icons the world over. Bringing together such intimate work as sketchbooks, personal memorabilia, annotated typescripts, short essays, home movies and near impossible to find archival work, THIS LONG CENTURY serves as a direct line to the contributers themselves.

'Somebody Stop Me', Amanda Ross-Ho's title for her first New York solo show, has the platitudinous ring of a bumper sticker or the type of all-caps outburst that the American comic-strip character Cathy might make just before a frenzied spending spree at a shoe shop. (Punch-line: 'On second thought, don't!')

Taking a conceptual approach to making objects, Amanda Ross-Ho mines her life, the Internet and her own art to create poetic works that investigate how language is structured and relationships are formed.

At the heart of Amanda Ross-Ho's recent installation at Pomona College Museum of Art, the Los Angeles-based artist's first solo museum exhibition, was a giant fiberglass candy dish in the form of a smiling wide-eyed ghost - the kind of novelty home decor one might expect to fond on the shelves of Target in late October but here inflated to larger than-life proportions.

The title of Amanda Ross-Ho's recent solo show at the Pomona College Museum of Art, "The Cheshire Cat Principle," is a clear tip-off that she's an artist who thinks about invisibility. Things in her oeuvre, are not always what they seem. Working with images, objects and ideas from everywhere and anywhere--from mass culture to private life, from high-end philosophy to the diurnal routines of her feline companions--Ross-Ho sorts her gleanings in a studio world where improvisation and elaboration rule the day (and night). 

"We can't get enough, because there's too much." In this statement for her nihilistically titled 2007 exhibition "Nothin Fuckin Matters," at Cherry and Martin in Los Angeles, Amanda Ross-Ho articulates a condition of cultural excess, in which freedom has become synonymous with consumer choice. In the face of a seemingly endless supply of desirable goods, we still can't get no satisfaction. 

Amanda Ross-Ho's recent show, "Nothin Fuckin Matters," expanded on her ability to create disparate unions, mixing in her assemblages not only media but also unexpected formal and cultural references (think John McCracken's sensibility as interpreted by Punky Brewster, or Claes Oldenburg raiding a lumberyard) to create subtly rhetorical moves. 

Los Angeles artist Amanda Ross-Ho combines a bare-bones DIY formal approach with a jaunty, high-minded conceptualism, employing sculpture, photography and installation to construct dimensional meditations on how humans occupy space. The exbition includes several examples of her mixed-media 'leaning' pieces - very large rectangles of Sheetrock leaning against gallery walls, on which are hung various photographic and canvas-based images, so that the Sheetrock panels function both as sculptural elements and as display walls themselves.