Angela Ho - The Phenomena of Hope

Angela Ho
Outré Gallery Fitzroy
4 Oct - 27 Oct 2024

Opening Night
6–8pm on Friday, 4 Oct 2024
319 Smith Street, Fitzroy
Drinks provided by Range Life Wine & Bodriggy Brewing Co.

Angela Ho is a visual artist working under the moniker ‘Ahoy’. She creates her work digitally, with paint, animation and augmented reality for commercial projects and exhibitions. Hong Kong and Melbourne are the cities she calls home.

Angela's work is influenced by storytelling within popular culture particularly fantasy and science fiction to reflect societal concerns. An interest in modes of communication on social media to express emotions and concepts also inspires her work. Her aesthetic reflects mid-century paraphernalia as well as the animations of Fleischer Studios and early Disney.

Angela's commercial clients have included The New York Times For Kids, Adobe, Slurpee 7-Eleven, Vans, GQ, Fast Company magazine and Beat Bites amongst others. She was named one of Adobe’s Global Creators in 2021.

Her paintings have been exhibited with the following galleries: Outré, Beinart, Corey Helford, Dorothy Circus, the Wassaic Project and BSMT Space in Melbourne, LA, Rome, New York and London respectively. Angela's work was featured in the April 2019 print edition of Hi-Fructose New Contemporary Art magazine.

Artist Statement

On April 8 of this year (2024) there was a total solar eclipse visible from Mexico and parts of North America. At that time I read an LA Times article in which a professor of psychology and social behaviour spoke about how the sense of awe felt from the eclipse could result in “a sense of feeling connected to something bigger than yourself, like your community, your society or your world. Getting people to feel that way is totally vital to our species’ survival and longevity.”

This sentiment struck a chord with me.

Watching the escalating polarisation within societies and across international borders developing from the time of the years of the pandemic had increasingly left me uneasy and I felt a cynicism creeping into the way I perceived the world and life.

Over the last few years I’ve been trying to remedy this through playing with concepts which took some details of the inflection points we’ve been living through and turning them into my form of a static fairytale. Heavy on joy, inverting the darkness. I’ve included some of these works in this body of work. Some were conceived just after I left Hong Kong to travel in 2022 and are deeply personal to me. They also lead into the more recently created works.

A few days before the total eclipse I saw on social media volcanic vortex rings being blown into a bright blue sky by Mount Etna in Sicily, Italy. I found the sight completely enchanting and wondrous. Then in May of this year intense Northern and Southern auroras shone over parts of the world unaccustomed to seeing these curtains of light. In July a triple rainbow arched over Tai Lam Chung, Hong Kong.

These rare phenomena brought me a sense of hope as I saw other people captivated by them. The work in this exhibition evolved from this feeling.