Amanda Ross-Ho: Untitled Inventory (CATALOGUE IRRAISONNÉ)
January 12 – March 16, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, January 12, 5-7 pm
Amanda Ross-Ho’s work takes the form of experimental archival research, driven by conflicting impulses towards sentimentality and clinical objectivity. Embracing contradictions between forensics and theatre, her work’s aim is not to establish clarity or secure links to the past, but to closely analyse, disarticulate, and exaggerate artifacts into poetic forms. The resulting reconfigurations suggest a type of liberated futurity. Her work aims to monumentalize the transitory and often corrupted relationships between time, form, witness, and memory.
For many years, Ross-Ho’s work has explored archives of diverse provenance, negotiating artifacts from visual culture, mass media, as well as her personal and familial history.
Untitled Inventory (CATALOGUE IRRAISONNÉ) is a new installation devised specifically for AEIVA that addresses the archive as subject, empirical pursuit, and an opportunity for fictive and theatrical abstraction. The exhibition functions as a corrupted and incomplete core sample of Ross-Ho’s practice, comprised of a carefully chosen selection of her own past works spanning from 1999 to the present, displayed in an unconventional tableau. While diverse in form, the works share in common an engagement with time as a material and condition. And while each work maintains an individual logic and memory, brought together in a new retrospective ecology they take on new meaning and form new connections within a new moment in time.
Untitled Inventory (CATALOGUE IRRAISONNÉ) is an act of experimental conservation, resisting stable and linear legibility and instead improvising with the retroactive gaze and the fugitive characteristics of archives, artifacts, and artistic gesture. As a new work comprised of past gestures, the exhibition proposes questions about how we define, classify, and evaluate form and gesture as it ages and moves through time.
Amanda Ross-Ho is an interdisciplinary artist and a professor of sculpture at the University of California, Irvine. She holds a BFA from the School of the Art institute of Chicago and an MFA from the University of Southern California. She has exhibited, lectured, and taught internationally. She has had exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The Walker Art Center, the Bonner Kunstverein and the Vleshaal Contemporary Art Center, among other venues. Recently she was included in Crack Up Crack Down, the 33rd Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts curated by Slavs and Tatars, and had a solo exhibition at Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway. She has presented commissioned public works at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, City Hall Park, New York City, the Parcours Sector of Art Basel Switzerland, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. In 2024 she will install her first permanent public sculpture on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University, and will publish a ten year career monograph with the Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, Middelburg, Netherlands. Ross-Ho's work has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times, ArtReview, Modern Painters, Art in America, Flash Art, Art + Auction, and Frieze among others. Ross-Ho lives and works in Los Angeles.
