Bearing the weight of the world: Amanda Ross-Ho rolls out a new performance at Frieze Los Angeles

For the Los Angeles-based artist Amanda Ross-Ho, scale is a matter of material as well as duration. “A repeated gesture is a way of making something gigantic,” she tells The Art Newspaper. When Art Production Fund approached her to imagine a work for the three-acre turf field at the Santa Monica airport during Frieze, her mind went to performance. To activate the synthetic green space, she realised she needed to create something that engaged both the physical conditions of the site and the temporary context of the fair. The result is Untitled Orbit (MANUAL MODE), a performance where the artist rolls a 16ft inflatable globe around the perimeter of the field continuously throughout Frieze’s open hours.

The idea came from watching kids kick a ball around the field during Ross-Ho’s initial site visit. Pushing a 75lb inflatable around in circles for seven hours a day certainly qualifies as an athletic feat, if not a mental one. She sees the rolling, lapping gesture as a kind of metric for the length of the fair—nearly 30 hours over the course of four days. As a clock’s hands circle the face, her body will orbit the field’s perimeter. “You can think of it as a container or a frame for the duration of the event,” she says.

Printed on the globe is Nasa’s famous 1972 “Blue Marble” photograph of the Earth seen from space—a recurring motif in Ross-Ho’s practice. “I’m drawn to contradiction,” she says. On one hand, the gleaming planet is an “establishing shot” that encompasses all of life; on the other, it makes the Earth seem small and manageable.

Ross-Ho is known primarily for her large-scale installations that engage intimacy and memory through monumentality and play. Her Untitled Thresholds (FOUR SEASONS) (2025), included in the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. biennial, features four heroic re-creations of her father’s nursing-home door. Through the production experience, Ross-Ho came to see her door sculptures as evidence of an unseen performance. Untitled Orbit (MANUAL MODE) makes that performance public.

While the planetary orb carries undertones of climate anxiety and recalls Los Angeles’s recent wildfires, Ross-Ho is more interested in visualising human labour and the Sisyphean task of continuing to move forward. “The work of living feels especially acute right now,” she says. Her effort also foregrounds the labour of the artist amid the frenzy of dealers and collectors inside the fair. “It’s poking fun at our habit of carrying and doing too much,” she says. “But it’s also holding up a mirror to a real weariness and sense of exhaustion.”

Ross-Ho’s exhaustion will no doubt be genuine. Highlighting the body’s fallibility is an intentional part of the process. Failure, she insists, is built into the piece. “There will be some theatricality, slapstick, maybe self deprecation,” she says. The inflatable could catch the wind or tear; her body could falter, give out.

For an artist who typically exerts exacting control over her materials, this performance represents a deliberate surrender to the unpredictable. She wonders about the audience’s endurance for watching someone struggle. “I have no idea if it will be painful or entertaining or humorous to watch,” she says. “All I know is that it’s going to be absurd.”