Untitled second floor (One big dark room)

For Amanda Ross-Ho, memory, hyperbole, duration, and myth-making are tools we use to register both loss and comprehension. Untitled second floor (One big dark room) is a 75% scale model replicating the second floor of Ross-Ho's Chicago childhood home. Scaled to fit the gallery, this installation forms the most recent in an ongoing body of work using archival research as experimental material and conceptual framework.

In the late ‘70s-early ‘80s the artist's mother, Laurel M. Ross, an artist and photographer, produced a series of photographs looking inward at the densely adorned rooms of their home as subject. In the photographs, private spaces of the home, the parents' bedroom, Ross-Ho’s bedroom, and the family darkroom, are remade into sites of artistic staging and aesthetic study. A set of negatives and prints from this domestic series suffered flood exposure in the house, sealing them together for nearly four decades. With the help of a conservator, the materials were separated but sustained significant damage.

Treating these images like continuity shots used for film production, Ross-Ho replicates the home as a set, aided by her own recollection and architectural details sourced from an online Zillow listing. The impossibility of stable translation between these three corrupted and incomplete sources turns the surrogate home into an apparatus for staging new gestures and images.

Untitled second floor (One big dark room) is a site for corporeal and emotional analysis. Specifics are forgotten, slights swell into catastrophes, effort extends until recognition, the everyday is remade as legendary—tuning the connective ties between the personal and the collective to an uncanny level. From within this home, Amanda Ross-Ho invites us to navigate the ongoing farce of developing a sense of continuity from sets of misremembered, reenacted, and excised fragments.