Audio Tour: MCA Chicago Plaza Project: Amanda Ross-Ho
About
Los Angeles–based artist Amanda Ross-Ho premieres her first outdoor public art project, THE CHARACTER AND SHAPE OF ILLUMINATED THINGS, in which she explores how photography is a direct analogue to the act of seeing. Updating Joseph Beuys's famous declaration “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.
THE CHARACTER AND SHAPE OF ILLUMINATED THINGS is the third iteration of the MCA Chicago Plaza Project, which has previously featured work by Mark Handforth (2011) and Martin Creed (2012).