Amanda Ross-Ho
 
May 4 – June 22, 2013
Opening, Saturday, May 4th, 6-8 pm
 
Shane Campbell Gallery is pleased to announce CRADLE OF FILTH, Amanda Ross-Ho’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery in Chicago. Ross-Ho will present a group of new paintings on dyed canvas, together with a large-scale, wall-bound soft sculpture.
 
Known for her diverse material dialectic, Ross-Ho uses interdisciplinary procedures to manifest complex networks of thought. CRADLE OF FILTH examines the formal and emotional properties of scale and unrestrained gesture, negotiating between expressive impulse and forensic sobriety.
 
The centerpiece and namesake for CRADLE OF FILTH is a hyper-articulated, 400 percent scale recreation of a teenaged girl’s backpack, which was found by the artist several years ago hanging from the side of a Chicago dumpster. Covered in densely scrawled palimpsests of band names, cultural affiliations, and youthful exclamations, the bag serves as a record and emblem of early developing self-expression.
 
Ross-Ho’s oversized reconstruction of this ephemeral document elevates it to monumental scale, training a photographic gaze on its impulsive markings. Through Ross-Ho’s reimagining, the massive backpack becomes a kind of ur vessel of identity formation, at once a reliquary and a fertility icon.
 
Inversely, Ross-Ho’s paintings function as analogous sites of theatrically brash expression. Drawing inspiration from the expulsive energy of the bag’s hieroglyphics, Ross-Ho uses the parallel space of the canvas as a stage for the unencumbered performance of abstract mark making. The paintings—at once confident, excessive, vulnerable, and tentative—emulate the capriciousness of the anonymous bag owner’s nonetheless urgent assertions of defiance and belonging.
 
Amanda Ross-Ho was born in Chicago and lives and works in Los Angeles. She has a concurrent solo show with Mitchell-Innes and Nash in New York and will present a large-scale public project at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in July. Her recent solo exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art was accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue and her work has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; Pomona College Museum of Art; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; and in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.
 
To obtain additional information please call Eric Ruschman at the gallery at 312.226.2223, or email eric@shanecampbellgallery.com.