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. This Friday, August 25th, 2023, we open the exhibition with Amanda Ross-Ho’s performance, Untitled Figure (THE CENTER OF IT ALL), at the Lloyd Center Ice Rink at 11:00am, an Artist Reception + FREE ICE SKATING HOUR at the rink from 12:00-1:00pm, followed by an Opening Reception at ILY2 from 2:00-5:00pm.

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.

Amanda Ross-Ho is an interdisciplinary artist and Professor of Sculpture at the University of California, Irvine. Born and raised in Chicago and currently living in Los Angeles, she holds a BFA from the School of the Art institute of Chicago and an MFA from the University of Southern California. She has exhibited, lectured, and taught internationally, including the 2008 Whitney Biennial, The Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The Walker Art Center, the Bonner Kunstverein and the Vleeshal Contemporary Art Center. Ross-Ho’s artistic activity originates in the archival impulse and attempts to reconcile a fraught relationship with the transitory. She develops tender intimacies with artifacts that populate commonplace encounters, elevating fragments from material culture, media, and daily life into speculative monuments, archives, and tableaux. Using oppositional strategies of forensics and theater, she dissects ephemeral structures and reconfigures them into enduring, outsized forms. Her sculptural installations propose reimagined ecologies of labor, time, and form, resulting in the development of an ongoing idiosyncratic formal syntax.