LOS ANGELES — The press release for Untitled Damages (ROOM DIVIDER) describes Amanda Ross-Ho’s parents’ bedroom in her childhood home. Originally two rooms, the artist recalls the scar left in the ceiling from when the joint wall was torn down, as well as her parents’ awkward attempts at dealing with the two remaining side-by-side doors, and a later attempt to split the room again using upholstered doors as room dividers. Installed at Leroy’s — formerly Thanh Vi Restaurant and now an artist-run space — the artist’s solo exhibition explores the traces that people and places leave on our lives, and the scars that remain when those relationships are severed.
Untitled Damages (ROOM DIVIDER) presents two bodies of flood-damaged photographs by Ross-Ho’s parents — one by her mother, Laurel M. Ross, picturing her childhood home; the other by her father, Ruyell Ho, from his days as a commercial photographer. Her mother’s black and white photographs are presented simply in acrylic shadow boxes. Notably, they are not mounted to any backing so the prints, curled and warped from water, sit inside these boxes like sculptural objects. In contrast, her father’s 8-by-10-inch color transparencies are displayed in light boxes, which double as light sources for the exhibition. The water damage has left strangely beautiful tendrils of swirling color snaking along the edge of each image.
Throughout, the artist’s touch is present: doors wrapped in fabrics matching those in her mother’s photos, found through reverse-image searches, rolls of photo background paper and clamps, and glass jugs filled with water. These jugs are a recurring motif in Ross-Ho’s work — a nod to the Carlo Rossi wine bottles her parents saved and reused to mix their photo chemicals. Here they hold the very substance that damaged her parents’ work. Although she has referenced her parents in previous art, this is the first time she has presented their archival material unmediated. As a result, her trademark humor is somewhat muted, and the sense of vulnerability and tenderness, subtly apparent in earlier exhibitions, takes center stage.
The venue’s former life as a Vietnamese restaurant introduces an additional presence to the mix. Much of the original space remains intact, such as the industrial shelving in the pantry area, the large pots on the grease-covered stove, and numbered stickers on the wall that mark where dining tables once sat. Ross-Ho has also added and arranged elements from the site’s past into the installation, including framed calligraphy that used to hang on the walls and stacked dishes and bowls. My favorite moments are when all these presences — the restaurant, the artist, and her parents — are visible simultaneously.
Even her last name, Ross-Ho, becomes a part of the installation. The hyphen is a divider, splitting her identity between two individuals, between two races. It is also a connector, a conduit, showing the way that these presences, identities, and places intermingle and feed into her own sense of self. Anyone with a hyphenated identity can surely relate to this paradox of feeling both split and glued together by disparate parts.
I was impressed by the way that Ross-Ho worked deftly with the eccentricities of the space to further enrich and complicate the overall themes she explores. It is a poignant meditation on the impact people and places leave on our lives, a moving reflection on the ways in which our identities are inexorably entangled with and shaped by our relationships and surroundings.Â
Amanda Ross-Ho: Untitled Damages (ROOM DIVIDER) continues at Leroy’s (422 Ord Street, Chinatown, Los Angeles) through March 1. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
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