Friday, November 14, 2014

Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach

Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach
(link)

Scale doesn't render well in reproduction, and the shifting relations of scale to the viewer seem mostly lost. The bobby pins and scalpels further enlarged than the white wine, against un-enlarged umbrellas; discordant scales for an unnerving sound.

The “crime scene” - as the PR describes the exhibition - filled with clues as symbols, objects rendered as signs, impressing a (crtl+T) click-and-drag virtuality to the space they inhabit. They become inhuman in their enlargement, no longer calibrated to bodily comfort but instead a fun-house manicism, of the world made slapstick, the clowning gotten carried away to mocking humanism and expressing willful laughter over its needs, forcing themselves upon you by bludgeoning distance with the brute force of size. This glove at distance looks the size of the one on on your hand. The shifts in scale reassert their indifference towards yours. Unlike Mark Manders whose subtle percentage scale shifts produce an uncanny uncertainty, Ross-Ho’s objects have totally left the human world, expressing none of the sentimentality of Gober, but rather a cold aggressive plasticity of its information.
Like the masks central to this exhibition, human emotion is traded for its systematic expression, reduced to sundial rythmn’s clockwork, the phases of the moon, inhuman.

See too: Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Micheline Szwajcer