Teeny Tiny Woman Shapes Character Of Illuminated Things On MCA Plaza

"Chicago-born, Los Angeles-based artist Amanda Ross-Ho premieres her first major public art project, The Character And Shape Of Illuminated Things, on the plaza of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago this summer," ArtDaily reports.

"Ross-Ho transforms the museum's plaza into an open air photo studio, with larger-than-life still-life models that the public are invited to engage with and photograph.

"The title of the exhibition is adapted from a 1980 photography handbook, How to Control and Use Photographic Lighting. In the manual, the author illustrates how different lighting affects three still-life objects - a cube, a sphere, and a female mannequin's head, all painted muted gray.

"Inspired by this fundamental lesson, Ross-Ho re-creates this trio of objects on a monolithic scale, faithful to the original image, with the mannequin head reaching 25-feet high.

"Completing the installation is a large-scale sculptural rendering of a color calibration card - the color grid that is used to maintain accuracy in the printing and post-production of color photography.

"By including this card, Ross-Ho consciously disrupts the gray composition.

"The visual experience of this site-specific installation changes over the course of the day as it responds to the path of the sun - which is the evershifting light source for this enormous still life."

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From the MCA:

"Updating Joseph Beuys's famous declaration that 'Everyone is an artist,' Ross-Ho suggests more specifically that today everyone is a photographer, as the ubiquity and speed of digital photography shapes the way we view and experience the world.

"In Ross-Ho's hands, the plaza is transformed into an enormous photo studio, with objects on display for the purpose of being photographed by the public, while the sun serves as a shifting source of light, affecting both our perception of how the objects look in real life and how they appear in our photographs."

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Amanda Ross-Ho elsewhere:

Interview with Bomb magazine.

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Whitney Biennial 2008 bio.

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Teeny Tiny Woman at the MOCA Pacific Design Center.

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Photography at MOMA.

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At MCA Chicago in 2010.

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