Amanda Ross-Ho and Catherine Taft in conversation

In conjunction with Amanda Ross-Ho’s solo exhibition, ICE TIME, ILY2 is pleased to announce a forthcoming conversation between Ross-Ho and writer and curator Catherine Taft. The conversation will take place Monday, October 16, 2023 at 6:30pm at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA). The gallery will be open for special viewing hours just prior to the conversation, from 5–6pm on October 16.

The exhibition draws upon Ross-Ho’s 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.

Few have a better perspective on Ross-Ho’s thinking about her practice than Taft, her longtime friend and colleague. In 2024, the Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, Middelburg, Netherlands will publish a ten-year career monograph on Ross-Ho’s practice, featuring a key essay by Taft.

Taft and Ross-Ho will address the forms and figures embedded in ICE TIME within the larger context of her practice, the entangled mediums of photography and sculpture, experimental archives, and the idiosyncratic disciplines of organized artistic sports–of which both have personal experience. 

Amanda Ross-Ho’s method synthesizes autobiography and anthropology, sentimentality and clinical forensics. She 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.” Her  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.

Catherine Taft is deputy director and curator at LAXART. Previously, she was associate curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she co-organized the inaugural show of its new building, America is Hard to See (2015) and curatorial associate in the department of architecture and contemporary art at the Getty Research Institute where she worked on the exhibitions and publications, Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950–1970 (2011) and California Video (2008). Her writing appears regularly in publications like Artforum, Cura, and Mousse, and she has contributed to monographs on artists including Matthew Barney, Carroll Dunham, Elliot Hundley, Yayoi Kusama, and Sterling Ruby. Taft is currently working on a survey of ecofeminist art (fall 2024) for which she was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Research Fellowship. She is a 2021 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow and serves as visiting faculty at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. 

ICE TIME, Amanda Ross-Ho’s solo exhibition, is on view at ILY2 through October 28. 

Founded in 2020, ILY2 takes an experimental approach to working with emerging and mid-career artists to produce exhibitions, editions, projects, and fair presentations. The team grounds the program and its focused support of artists in decades of gallery, advisory, collections, and curatorial experience. ILY2’s 1,660 square foot gallery is located in Portland’s Pearl District.