Talk

Amanda Ross-Ho’s work across sculpture, painting, installation, and photography explores the appropriation and dissemination of images and objects. She often utilizes everyday items such as bobby pins, “scrunchie” hair ties, X-ACTO blades, wine glasses, eye masks, and pants, but de-familiarizes their quotidian associations by enlarging them to a monumental scale. In doing so, she highlights the tension between these mass-produced objects and the process through which they become personal, intimate artifacts. The theatricality of this scale-shift is underpinned by the often intentionally comic nature of these large-scale novelty items.

While much of Ross-Ho’s work includes traces of the artmaking process, she has also engaged deeply with themes related to the public realm. Ross-Ho’s talk at The New School organized in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics will focus on her recent public works including, “Untitled Findings (ACCESS)” a series of large-scale keys placed throughout the city for Parcours at Art Basel 2017; her contribution to Public Art Fund’s group exhibition Image Objects (2015); and an earlier related public sculpture at MCA Chicago in 2013, which utilized a three-dimensional tableau replicating a female mannequin image appropriated from an early photography manual. For Image Objects at City Hall Park, Ross-Ho added a neon square to this existing tableau, highlighting the digital afterlife of art in the public realm. Its emphasis on the forms of facial recognition software and “intelligent” camera lenses offered an insightful meditation on how these technologies have altered public space, how we perceive it and are perceived in it.

Amanda Ross-Ho (b. 1975, Chicago) lives and works in Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions have been presented at University of Georgia (2017); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2017); Vleeshal, Middleburg (2016); Tramway, Glasgow (2017); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2014); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2013); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2017); The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2016); Public Art Fund, New York (2015); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2011); and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010). In 2008, her work was included in the Whitney Biennial and the California Biennale at the Orange County Museum of Art. Her work is included in the collections of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Saatchi Collection in London, Yale University Art Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Queensland Art Gallery. Ross-Ho received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998 and her MFA from the University of Southern California in 2006. Ross-Ho is represented by Mitchell-Inness & Nash in New York, Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago, The Approach in London, and Praz-Delavallade in Paris.

Public Art Fund Talks at The New School are organized by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

This program is made possible in part by Con Edison and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, as well as by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.