M. Ho

For this Front Room exhibition, Meredith Malone, Assistant Curator at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, presents a selection of works by contemporary artist M. Ho. Ho works predominately with newspaper, specifically The New York Times, to create a dynamic body of work that takes as its point of departure the loaded relationship between word and image. Chosen in close collaboration with the artist, the works included in this exhibition represent two series of collages: Strike (2003) and Talk to Us (2008).

Strike consists of pages taken from the “A Nation at War” section published by The New York Times at the start of the war in Iraq. On each page, Ho systematically conceals all text—paragraph by paragraph, line by line, and sometimes word by word—with delicate, hand-cut pieces of colored paper and found images of plants and flowers. Pinned on the walls in a continuous band, Strike transforms the supposedly factual and objective into something overtly mediated, intensely personal, and contradictory. By disrupting the viewer’s ability to scan the headlines, Ho’s images require a more prolonged, even meditative engagement. Strike provokes us to critically examine how words and photographs function in times of war. Do we rely on supplemental captions and text to tell us how to read the images we encounter, or is it the images that shape our understanding of the news media? How do we reconcile the unsettling juxtaposition of the seductive beauty of Ho’s collages and the violence and suffering depicted in the images? The monochrome swatches of color simultaneously suggest severe censorship, an erasure of history, and a radical rejection of the official narratives offered by the media.

Talk to Us, Ho’s most recent series of collages, evinces telling inversions of the strategies employed in Strike. Whereas Strike is marked by a significant absence of advertisements—the Times included none in the “A Nation at War” section—Talk to Us is drawn predominantly from ads found in the newspaper’s section A, where international news is featured alongside ads for high-end merchandise, and thus diamonds from Tiffany and Cartier dominate Ho’s compositions. The title of the series is taken from President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” speech on energy given after inviting civic leaders and a cross-section of the American people to express their opinions and concerns at Camp David. One respondent stated, “Mr. President, we’re in trouble. Talk to us about blood and sweat and tears.” Ho repeats these anxiety ridden words over and over again in tiny hand-drawn script that encircles the images of diamonds and runs along the margins of the paper as both a decorative element and an obscure caption. The artist considers these collages “ineffective protest posters” offering poignant ruptures that demand extended engagement, rather than easily digestible slogans.

M. Ho was born in 1970 in New Haven, CT and lives and works in Athens, GA. She received her B.A. from Princeton University before doing graduate work at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pennsylvania. Her artwork has been exhibited at Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, among others.

General support for the Contemporary’s exhibitions program is generously provided by the Whitaker Foundation; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; William E. Weiss Foundation; Regional Arts Commission; Missouri Arts Council, a state agency; Arts and Education Council; Nancy Reynolds and Dwyer Brown; and members of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

M. Ho 
Kurator: Meredith Malone