Amanda Ross-Ho at Mary Mary

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What a good cruel show. There’s more photos on Mary Mary’s website. Click and drag virtual to our emotional scales, our pain. 10. Until the walls are howling. Size is a cruelty, we don’t want our more fragile moments blown up on walls. Child burn units developed these, for children pre language, to describe their pain as burned children, white rooms of red. Is there anything more unimaginable than this?  As a means of exchange we turn emotion into a signifier, turn it into plastic information, capable of all sorts of manipulation. “A universal metric to measure human suffering” Your pain is universal, equivocal, exchangeable for the pain of others. This is the best we could come up with to communicate with red children. The world is still primitive, its virtualization even more so. We all fear technology but not its precursors. (like)

Amanda Ross-Ho at The Pit, Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach

Amanda Ross-Ho at The Pit

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The sign destroyed sculpture. Serra could not make something so big. The physical manifestation, the billboard is made to crush distance. By sheer determination of size it virtualizes space by collapsing distance between you and it, seen from two parking lots away. Turns the world plastic. Are designed with intent. Against the night the billboard burns with energy to grab you. The sign is made to penetrate, legibility as force. Legibility like attentional assault. Mental buggery with the wet muscle of signification replacing the consensual. It takes an equal determination to not see the sign for what it intends, replace itself with what it intends, the world with information. Hope: An exhibition of Giacometti sculptures and Neon.


See too: Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach

Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach

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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