Untitled Second Floor (ONE BIG DARK ROOM)

Untitled Second Floor (ONE BIG DARK ROOM) is a 75% scale model replicating the second floor of Ross-Ho's Chicago childhood home. Using memory, hyperbole, duration, and myth-making to register loss and comprehension, this installation is the most recent in an ongoing body of work using archival research as material and framework.

In the late ‘70s to early ‘80s the artist's mother, Laurel M. Ross, produced a series of photographs looking inward at the densely adorned rooms of their home. 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 home into an apparatus for staging new interpretations.

“It's not like I have to strain to remember this house,” says Ross-Ho. “But I can't recount every single thing. Artistically, I'm withholding and I'm curating and I'm selecting so that there is a new monument to this thing that is not the broken thing that I've inherited, but the broken thing I made.”

Periodically during the run of Untitled Second Floor (ONE BIG DARK ROOM), Ross-Ho will perform Untitled Demolition (HYPHEN), in which she repeatedly demolishes and rebuilds the wall between the front two bedrooms of the house, her parent's bedroom.