Untitled Damages (ROOM DIVIDER)

Amanda Ross-Ho
“Untitled Damages (ROOM DIVIDER)”
JANUARY 17 – MARCH 1, 2025
Opening Reception: January 17, 2026, 8 pm-12am

I grew up in a large Victorian house that had once been a hippie commune. One of the bedrooms was converted into a black-and-white darkroom. Depending on how you counted, the house had either six or seven bedrooms. This discrepancy in the math was on account of my parents’
bedroom having once been two rooms, unified by tearing down the large wall between them. The wall’s removal made for some curious architectural anomalies. There was a long, visceral scar that stretched across the ceiling and down the walls. It was never repaired. Two doors stood side-by-side and opened into the room. I regularly walked in and out of them like a revolving door. I also remember my dad nailing one of the doors shut at some point, in an attempt to normalize it as a single room. It’s possible that never happened. At some stage, my parents erected a contraption made of multiple doors, hinged together and upholstered with bohemian fabrics, splitting the room in half once again.

A presentation of two archives:

Laurel M. Ross, selected flood-damaged silver gelatin prints from the series “Places In My House,” circa 1982, acrylic shadowboxes

Ruyell Ho, selected flood-damaged 8×10 inch color transparencies from Communigrafix
Photographic Studios, Chicago, Illinois, circa 1982, acrylic, Port-a-Trace lightboxes

Hollow core doors, vintage fabrics, Savage Widetone seamless background paper, aluminum thumbtacks, Jorgensen clamps, safelights, gallon jugs, water

Amanda Ross-Ho was born and raised in Chicago and lives and works in Los Angeles. She is an interdisciplinary artist and a professor of sculpture at the University of California, Irvine. She is currently fifty years old.