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| Amanda Ross-Ho, Untitled Prop Archive (THE PORTFOLIO), 2024 |
Amanda Ross-Ho's father, Ruyell Ho, emigrated from Shanghai to California in 1955. Aspiring to be a commercial photographer, he photographed tabletop still-lifes of household objects to build a portfolio: a "fake-it-till-you-make-it act of survival." For a piece now at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Ross-Ho sourced facsimiles of the objects from online auctions and arrayed them on an outsized version of the table her father used. It's a typology of art, consumerism, and the siren song of American success.
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| Amanda Ross-Ho, Untitled Waste Image (HEAVY DUTY), 2024 |
Ho's tactic landed a job photographing products for catalogs. The
Prop Archive is shown with a poignant lightbox version of an image in which Ho appeared in-frame, to check the lighting for an absent model. Water damage to the analog medium created trippy blue patterns.
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| Amy Yao, Foreign Investments (Bottarga in Costa Mesa), 2017/2024 (detail) |
Ross-Ho's works are part of "Scratching at the Moon," a group show of 13 Asian-American artists at ICA-LA. The first work you'll encounter is outdoors and easy to miss. Amy Yao's Foreign Investments (Bottarga in Costa Mesa) layers knockoffs of Chinese silk textiles with orange safety netting and chain-link fence.
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| Amy Yao, Foreign Investments (Bottarga in Costa Mesa), 2017/2024, at ICA-LA parking space |
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| Michelle Lopez, Correctional Lighting, 2024 |
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Michelle Lopez is a Philadelphia-based artist whose sculptures "are designed to wilt, sway, and fall." Commissioned for this show,
Correctional Lighting is a motorized mobile of a highway lamp and a glass cinder block. The slowly rotating light casts a shadow of the glass brick on the gallery walls, evoking prison yard floodlights and cosmic cycles.
"Scratching at the Moon" runs through July 28, 2024.
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