Los Angeles-based artist Amanda Ross-Ho recently created a performance art piece that represents the Earth’s rotation around the sun.

The artist was approached by Art Production Fund to create a piece for a three-acre turf field at the Santa Monica airport during Frieze. She decided to create a performance art piece that engaged both the site’s physical conditions and the event’s context.

Planetary Performance Art Piece

She ended up creating a piece called Untitled Orbit (MANUAL MODE), in which she rolled a 16-foot inflatable globe around the perimeter of the field continuously throughout the open hours of the event. Ross-Ho was inspired by watching kids kick a ball around the field during her initial visit to the site.

“A repeated gesture is a way of making something gigantic,” Ross-Ho stated to The Art Newspaper.

The artist pushed the 75-pound inflatable ball in circles for seven hours per day, which amounted to approximately 30 hours over the course of 4 days.

“You can think of it as a container or a frame for the duration of the event,” she added.

The globe has NASA’s famous 1972 “Blue Marble” photograph of the Earth seen from space printed on its surface. This is meant to evoke the idea of both an “establishing shot” that encompasses all of life on the planet, as well as how Earth seems small from this vantage point.

In addition to symbolizing Earth’s orbit, the piece is also meant to represent human labor and the task of continuously moving 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.”