The locus of Amanda Ross-Ho’s art

The work of Amanda Ross-Ho can be difficult to get a handle on from any one perspective: full of jokes, inversions and feedback loops, personal anecdotes and family history, obscure taxonomies and seemingly random associations, all routed through giddy myriad media. There are few obvious entry points, and the progression is far from linear.

One good place to start, however, is the studio itself, which serves as both a formal and a conceptual anchor to much of the work. Sheetrock figures prominently in her sculptures and installations, as do paint smudges and bleed-throughs, scraps of canvas, raw wood, boxes, stencils, tools, photographs of previous works, and all the random objects that tend to land in a studio after piquing an artist’s interest somewhere in the world. Ross-Ho often arranges these elements as if to signify the residue of production but for a product that may or may not have ever materialized. When discussing the work, she speaks more often of “gestures” than of results or finished objects.

“A big part of the work,” as she puts it, “is about watching myself work in the space.”

Ross-Ho’s actual studio is a former retail distribution warehouse just south of downtown that she shares with her artist partner, Erik Frydenborg, and an affectionate trio of cats. The space consists of a small office; a long, open space for Ross-Ho; an enclosed space for Frydenborg (who works in materials that are hazardous for the cats); and an enclosed courtyard filled with potted plants mostly donated by friends in transition. (“We specialize in plant rescue for traumatic situations,” she jokes.)

Dressed in a faded black T-shirt, black jeans and canvas sneakers, the 35-year-old artist has an easy, amiable demeanor, unaffected but self-assured. Raised in Chicago by artist parents, she attended the Art Institute there and lived and exhibited in Chicago for several years before coming to Los Angeles to get her master’s in fine arts at USC (where she met Frydenborg).

It was a busy spring, with both artists mounting solo shows in April — Ross-Ho at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York, Frydenborg at Cherry and Martin (also Ross-Ho’s L.A. gallery) — and the studio now has the air, on this summer afternoon, of an operation just beginning to gather steam once more, scattered with the scraps and stray pieces that will be churned into future installations.

It is an operation whose alchemical nature Ross-Ho both relishes and takes pains to demystify. For the 2008 California Biennial, she transported the actual walls of her then- East L.A. studio into the galleries of the Orange County Museum of Art: nine massive panels covered in paint residue, torn canvas, tacked-up images and other odds and ends. (She re-created the installation last spring at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.) It made for surprisingly elegant sculpture, with a formal character that belied its archeological implications. She later produced a series of individual works on poster-sized pieces of sheetrock — similar in appearance but fabricated rather than excavated — that she conceived as “fictionalized” versions of the real studio walls.

“If the idea of an actual space brought out of the studio has this authenticity,” she says, “then those pieces are like paintings of that. They’re about watching that activity and shifting it into something that can be choreographed.”

In some cases, the studio allusions are atmospheric or associative rather than literal. For the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Ross-Ho perforated the walls of her allotted installation space with thousands of pegboard-like drill holes, giving the prestigious and rarified realm of the Biennial the feel of a humble garage workshop — a cheekily democratic gesture that was only heightened by her placement at the center of the installation of a giant, obsessively detailed replica of her cats’ litter box.

“Something that’s gone through the work consistently for a while is this idea of making an intimate connection with the actual context or the physical space,” she says. “But that not being the only gesture, that just setting the tone, or providing the space to house other things. It goes back to that initial idea of making things in one space and bringing them into another. For me it solves that problem: It’s like setting down this layer of intimacy first and then bringing things in so that there’s not that foreign membrane that exists between everything.”

This instinct for spatio-categorical meddling is a prominent vein throughout the work, extending well beyond the studio-gallery problem. For a group exhibition at the Art Institute last winter, Ross-Ho reached into personal history, creating an installation that consisted entirely of the artistic residue — old works and artifacts — she’d left behind in Chicago — a characteristically clever inversion of the simultaneous appearance of her East L.A. studio walls at the Museum of Contemporary Art across town.

For a show at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle this fall, she is creating a work that, while slight to the point of invisibility in itself, will expand once installed to literally swallow the entire show: a series of reflective security globes — inspired by a photograph she came across in a magazine depicting a reflection in one of Jeff Koons’ oversized metallic balloon dogs — that will hang from the ceiling in each of the show’s several galleries, creating a panoramic reflection of everything in the room.

What emerges most strikingly in both the work itself and Ross-Ho’s articulate discussion of it is a kind of artistic holism, an insistence on the acknowledgment and exploration of all aspects of the system, often to the detriment — indeed, the downright abandonment — of the traditionally hallowed fine art object. One begins to have a sense of the work less as a sequence of productions than as a cognitive system unto itself, a complex generative logic, of which the studio is the both the physical and the conceptual locus.

“I’m interested in the life cycle of production,” she says. “Not just one part, not just the end or the beginning, I’m interested in the loop. Each project is this little cycle, and there’s also the bigger arc. I’m constantly going back to old forms and bringing them back in or looking at things retroactively. There’s a lot of trying to mess with that process.”

calendar@latimes.com