UNTITLED PERIOD PIECE
TRAMWAY
10 November – 20 December 2017
(Preview 9thNovember 7-9PM)
Tramway are delighted to announce ‘UNTITLED PERIOD PIECE’ Amanda Ross-Ho’s first solo exhibition in a public gallery in the UK.
Amanda Ross-Ho’s sculptural work encompasses a diverse range of media, comingling the handmade with the readymade. Her exhibitions carefully orchestrate the personal and the universally familiar into complex theatrical tableaus. Industrially-produced objects are often copied using artisanal skills, translating them into scaled up decoys. In Ross-Ho’s environments, objects, images and ideas are doubled, repeated and inverted to the point of exhaustion. Commonplace dichotomies such as black and white, large and small, digital and analogue abound. She plays with the relationship between images and objects, allowing form to slip between two and three dimensional representations. Sculptural objects embody the qualities of the flat, scalable, and endlessly reproducible photographic image, resulting in a dimensional, yet pictorial experience.
UNTITLED PERIOD PIECE is a new body of work that collapses and inverts notions of time, labour and economy. The exhibition takes the form of a factory floor dedicated to the assembly line mass production of oversized black trousers. Like the film genre of historical period drama or a “period piece” that retroactively dramatizes a specific time period, the exhibition presents the authentic artifacts of laborious textile production alongside theatrically amplified ones to dramatically re-enact itself in real time. Inspired in part by Charlie Chaplin’s political comedy ’Modern Times’, made in 1936 during the great global recession, tropes of economic insecurity, time, and the slapstick friction between human fallibility and mechanized production echo throughout the exhibition.
24 oversized black trousers are hung at regular intervals with their pocket linings entirely inverted. A widely understood symbol of bankruptcy, they resonate with a monumental presence and absence. Looming over the installation is video capturing a continuous twelve hour shot of a ‘barber shop clock’, accelerated to one hour. Designed to be viewed in a mirror, the anxious hands move anti-clockwise over an inverted clock face, telling us of a time that is both forwards and backwards.
The exhibition was commissioned by Bonner Kunstverein with Vleeshal, Middelburg and generously supported by Kunststiftung NRW, Volksbank Bonn Rhein-Sieg and the Mondriaan Fund.
Amanda Ross-Ho (b. 1975, Chicago) studied at the Art Institute of Chicago before completing an MA in Fine Art at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2014); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2013) and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012). Her work has also been presented within significant group surveys including ‘Ordinary Pictures’, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, ‘New Photography’ Museum of Modern Art, New York; ‘Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside and Out’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (both 2010) and at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, New York. In 2015 she was commissioned by the Public Art Fund to produce a major new work for City Hall Park, New York and this summer she presented a multi-site, outdoor sculptural installation in the Parcours Sector at Art Basel Switzerland. This September she created a large onsite solo exhibition and installation at Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York. She is Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University of California, Irvine. Ross-Ho lives and works in Los Angeles.