Amanda Ross-Ho, “Cradle of Filth” (2013) (image via shanecampbellgallery.com)
CHICAGO — Amanda Ross-Ho recreated a soft-sculpture replica of an anonymous teen-girl’s backpack, blowing it up to 400% of its original size. It hangs at the back of the white-walled gallery space, the focal point of her solo exhibition Cradle of Filth that juxtaposes this adolescent girl’s heart-and-soul scribbled onto a backpack with a series of abstract paintings on a faded, light-blue colored canvas that mirrors that of the backpack itself. Titles like “Untitled Painting (BLINK 182)” and “Untitled Painting (HALLOWEEN NIGHT!)”suggest the emotional gushing of the backpack’s teen-girl aesthetic.
This all typifies Ross-Ho’s style, in which she often chooses found objects that embody a particular class or sociopolitical group, placing them in a gallery space, and meshing “high art” culture with a mass media “low culture” street aesthetic much in the same way that artist Abigail DeVille does through her site-specific detritus installations. A stark difference between the work of DeVille and Ross-Ho is there is not an ounce of humanity present in the former’s work; for Ross-Ho, the human presence makes this work snap and click, buckle and bend — like a nimble young girl practicing her gymnastics skills.
Ross-Ho’s work also echoes the objecthood of Claes Oldenburg’s pop art soft sculptures like “Spoonbridge and Cherry” (1985) or the giant badminton birdies of the Shuttlecocks series (1994). Oldenburg’s work acts as a disruption to Abstract Expression in the same way Ross-Ho’s giant girl backpack brings a purely teen-girl aesthetic into the art world.
Read the full review on Hyperallergic: http://hyperallergic.com/70631/amanda-ross-ho-cradle-of-filth/
