Wallworks
photo: Ira Schrank, Sixth Street Studio
VERTICAL PLOT(DARK MATTER COMMUNITY GARDEN WITH BACKWARDS PURPOSE)
(2009)
Amanda Ross-Ho
b. 1975, Chicago. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Canvas dropcloths, aluminum pushpins, graphite, black gesso, spraybottles, rags, embroidery scissors, yogurt containers, buckets, vans, graduated containers, nitrile gloves, plastic cutlery, bobby pin, rubber band, economy bristle brushes
25 x 37.3 feet
Courtesy of Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles, and Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York
Granting presence to sites of absence, Amanda Ross-Ho’s fascination with generative processes is evident in her large-scale installations wherein silhouettes, traces, residues and other negative spaces abound. She works between the function of pattern in textile arts and the place of production, often referencing the place where something is made while it hangs displaced in a gallery setting. Images of lacing flow through the work, either by perforating a wall or cutting canvas to imitate the shape of a macramé wall hanging. Her reclamation of kitsch domesticity is pierced with mass media images and hints at the viability of girl culture as it confronts urban grit.
As a central aspect of her practice, Amanda Ross-Ho makes a special point of revealing and exposing the process of making a work of art. For VERTICAL PLOT (DARK MATTER COMMUNITY GARDEN WITH BACKWARDS PURPOSE), the production and presentation of the work occupied the same site and Ross-Ho conceived a work where the life cycle of production was “on view” during the studio phase of the exhibition. Ross-Ho has likened her grid of canvases to farming, and the idea of “harvesting” the fertile field, as one may grow a vegetable or fruit and then pluck it for consumption. Here the metaphor of food production and the representation of commodities have been overlaid one on top of the other. The painting, which takes advantage of the full height of the wall, is formally structured into two grid systems with one nested into the other. There are nine individual canvas components with each representing a different taxonomy of objects found on the internet, magazines, and other sources. The artist’s choice of source objects is very personal, from the domestic to the forensic. Included are tree leaves selected for their varying shape, police seizures of money and drugs, single earrings without their partner being sold on ebay, and hand crocheted doilies. However, the particulars of these objects have been obscured through a series of moves towards abstraction and reduction. A projection of a photograph of a grid of objects is traced in pencil and then the individual objects are painted black. The black is then cut away leaving only a hole, outlined with the original form, in the remaining canvas, and the residue from the paint that had soaked through the canvas is made visible on the wall. With this final move, the images of individual objects are emptied of physicality with only their ghostly aura remaining. Evident in this work is Ross-Ho’s previous experience in textile production, where consistency of process reliably yields a pattern based in repetition and alignment. She purposely skews her equally reliable operational approach towards an entropic end, where the leftovers become the centerpiece. Thus Ross-Ho releases the objects of their commonplace meanings by placing them within her double “ordering” system of manufacture and collapse while at the same time making a deliberate and poetic reference to the transient nature of these everyday compositions in our lives.
Ross-Ho’s recent solo exhibitions were held at Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles and the Saatchi Gallery, London. Group exhibitions include, Index: Conceptualism in California from the Permanent Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Make Room, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, and Spoils and Relics, The Approach E2, London. Ross-Ho was also included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
— Betti-Sue Hertz