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.

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. 

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’.

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.