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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.