ICE TIME
Amanda Ross-Ho
Aug 24–Oct 21
Performance at Lloyd Center Ice Rink: Friday, Aug 25 @ 11am
ILY2 is honored to present ICE TIME, a solo exhibition of new works by Amanda Ross-Ho. Presented in conjunction with Converge 45’s 2023 biennial program, Social Forms: Art as Global Citizenship, Ross-Ho’s exhibition draws upon her formative years as a competitive and theatrical figure skater in the 80s and 90s. Using this as a formal departure point and a tracking device, ICE TIME outlines parallels between the variable logics of arenas that present, record, accumulate, and erase gestures (rink, table top, studio, gallery). Skins, surfaces, and corporeal forms are explored for their response to pressurized and formulaic systems of training and inscription. The body is invoked as a tool, a material, a witness, and a unit of collateral damage.
Time is both subject and a direct material in Ross-Ho’s work. ‘Ice time' is a practical term describing a unit of measurement for temporal access to an ice-skating rink. Clocking hours on the ice and on the body quantifies an investment into transformation. The words “ice” and “time” also invoke the slowness of deep geological or archaeological time, ice itself suggesting the cadence of arrested form, preservation, or transformation between states. Repetition is an index that archives the passing of time and an operation that informs memory and choreography. For ICE TIME, Ross-Ho specifically focuses on muscle memory, drawing on a repetition of figures that condition and form both body and subject. The gallery becomes an extension of the body as a container for both authentic gesture and stagecraft, populated with surrogate artifacts shaped by a corrupted link to the past.
Between autobiography and anthropology, sentimentality and clinical forensics, Ross-Ho’s method begins with an inventory of forms, materials, and textures populating the memory palace. The method considers memory and its reproduction through a highly specific material archive. The formal results are evocative sculptures, abstract translations of these physical artifacts. Ross-Ho has written about producing “alternative archives of anomalous memory.” Amanda Ross-Ho’s work has been exhibited widely, in the Whitney Biennial, at the Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The Walker Art Center, the Bonner Kunstverein, and the Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Ross-Ho will present a performance at the Lloyd Center Mall Ice Rink, notoriously the rink where the tragic figure Tonya Harding learned to skate. The performance, Untitled Figure (THE CENTER OF IT ALL), at the Lloyd Center Mall Ice Rink will take place Friday, August 25 at 11am, followed by a reception and free skate, sponsored by ILY2, from 12-1pm. Admission is free and open to the public. Ross-Ho’s performance is presented in conjunction with the opening weekend of the Converge 45 2023 biennial program, Social Forms: Art as Global Citizenship.