Amanda Ross-Ho’s sculptural work encompasses a diverse range of media. Her exhibitions typically combine the handmade with the readymade. Industrially-produced objects are often copied using artisanal skills, scaled up, reproduced and repeated. Her references shift from the personal to the universally familiar. This exhibition presents a new body of work inspired in part by Charlie Chaplin’s political comedy ’Modern Times’, made in 1936 during the great global recession. The installation takes the form of a factory floor dedicated to the production of oversized garments. Ross-Ho’s surreal, theatrical environment collapses and inverts notions of time, labour and economy. 24 sculptures in the form of scaled-up black trousers are hung at regular intervals around the room. Handmade but apparently identical, they are presented with other works that serve to deconstruct and amplify their laborious production. At the centre of the exhibition is a projected image of a barber’s shop clock. Designed to be viewed in a mirror, the hands move anti-clockwise over an inverted clock face. Ross-Ho’s 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 also plays with the relationship between images and objects or two and three dimensional representation. An image of a silverfish is rendered as a series of 3D prints. Elsewhere other sculptural objects embody the qualities of the flat, scalable, endlessly reproducible, photographic image in three dimensional form.

The exhibition is co-commissioned with Vleeshal, Middelburg and generously supported by Kunststiftung NRW, Volksbank Bonn Rhein-Sieg and the Mondriaan Fund. It is Ross-Ho’s first solo exhibition in Germany.

Amanda Ross-Ho (b. 1975, Chicago) studied at California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland and 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. She is Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University of California, Irvine. Ross-Ho lives and works in Los Angeles.