The Museum of Contemporary Art presents AMANDA ROSS-HO: TEENY TINY WOMAN, on view at MOCA Pacific Design Center from June 23 through September 23, 2012. Amanda Ross-Ho is one of the leading Los Angeles artists of her generation and this new installation is her largest and most ambitious exhibition to date. Created specifically for the MOCA Pacific Design Center, TEENY TINY WOMAN presents her ongoing engagement with translation, scale, and the authored collapse of authentic and performed gestures, combining large-scale paintings, fabricated objects, textiles, and photographs within a custom architectural environment. Multiple forms explore and advance her relationship with the metaphorical potential of photography.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
For almost a decade, Ross-Ho has engineered an elaborate set of conceptual and formal operations that guide her art-making practice. These methodical procedures allow her to navigate her immediate surroundings, namely the incessant fluctuation of popular and unpopular visual cultures and their direct points of connection to personal and universal truths. The result is a specific and consistently evolving personal language, with which Ross-Ho constructs carefully articulated poetic environments.
Ross-Ho’s work often originates from observations of her own movements within a designated space; she regularly investigates the studio itself as a fertile site for identifying potential in generative and reflexive processes. Although her process is rooted in immediacy and chance, it is executed with precise intentionality. Within this highly sensitized approach, authentically haphazard formal gestures are placed under careful scrutiny, and systematically choreographed in subsequent iterations. Ross-Ho’s work does not terminate in completed forms, but gains meaning through an exponential accumulation of contexts. Within the structure of each work is an embedded life cycle, mapping an organic trajectory that leads from conception through reception in its various aggregating forms.
The exhibition includes 17 wall panels, collectively equivalent to the exact interior measurements of her downtown L.A. studio, which were built onsite in the exhibition space and then transferred to her studio space. For an extended time, they accumulated the genuine residue of production, acting as literal stages for a series of hyperbolic, choreographed maneuvers borrowed from daily studio activity. For the exhibition, the walls will be returned to the museum, creating an architectural lining on which to present a connective system of discreet works—paintings, objects, and textiles—compounded in an address of translation, scale, and nested opposition. Each wall, based on the proportions of a sheet of paper, acts as a museum-scale page on which to present a non-linear flux of data, taxonomical arrangements, and explicitly authored compositions.
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