Santa Fe-based designer and artist Paulina Ho’s work tilts reality to find pleasure in the everyday absurdities of her new Southwestern environs.
Paulina Ho isn’t entirely sure why she started creating visions of the desert when she was living in Queens, New York, during a long post-pandemic winter. In one composition from that time, rich earth tones are the backdrop for a slightly off-kilter cactus, pulled down by its shadow (Don’t Tell Me What To Do). In another, a flower floats above desert earth to meet its reflection (I Gotta Listen To My Intuition More).The emergence of these visual themes was a surprise to Ho, having been a tried-and-true city dweller whose work has a bold style that felt distinctly urban. When construction in her apartment building forced her to move, the call to go West was clear on canvas.
A prolific creator, Ho has a bustling CV with clients like Google, Kashi, and The New York Times—and now Southwest Contemporary, for our fifth anniversary merchandise line. Her work often features graphic, sometimes cartoon-like characters—her interest since she was a kid—and twists reality just enough to create a moment of pause. “I like pushing what is reality and what’s not,” she says. “I like very subtle play with things like shadows or things floating. I like skewing things. When it’s in liminal space I find it to be more interesting.”
Designs for a puzzle by the children’s store Camp have, as Ho writes, “Lots of curious and friendly engagement between astronauts, aliens, and asiago.” In work for the company formerly known as Twitter, Ho created digital stickers including one that reads, “Thanks I hate it.” In concepts for Twitter’s error message, she drew a Twitter bird hitting a glass window. Her work is an articulation of finding pleasure in the slight absurdity of the everyday.
After over a decade of constant design work, Ho started to move toward fine art and painting on canvas. During that especially grim post-2020 New York winter, Ho found a mental escape in Southwest-inspired visions. Born in California and raised in Houston, Ho had never been conscious of having a connection with the Southwest, but during this time she had a keen interest in pueblos—perhaps the idea of sun-baked adobe warmed her spirit. Encouragement from a New Mexico-based mentor led her to a monthlong stay in Taos, which then led to her exodus from New York.
The sprawling landscape of Taos, infinite relative to the skyscraper-filled sightlines of the city, provided her mind with the luxuries of space and quiet, but that wealth of psychic real estate was challenging. “It was really hard to adjust initially because it was wide open spaces, no distractions, no targeted ads. It’s like a gift and a curse because my thoughts were way more apparent. There’s no escaping that. Ultimately I knew that this was the best thing for me and I just had to power through. For the first time, it forced me to be open to whatever life has in store and just go with it.”
Unlike the collaborative spirit of working with clients on design projects, one that’s inherently imbued with parameters and boundaries, Ho’s fine art practice confronts the challenges of being without limits. “It’s really hard for me to not have an assignment,” she says. “For me what’s helped is journaling. The title comes first before I paint. I’ll have random phrases that come to mind first, and sometimes they will repeat and then sometimes an image will come up, and that’s what I paint. You can’t force it, it just happens.”
What has happened in Ho’s recent work is a beautiful progression from the precise lines of her design work to a fluidity that seems to reflect her artistic and inner evolution. Pieces in a recent exhibition at Smoke the Moon gallery in Santa Fe show a looser version of her mildly surreal take on the known that is rich in emotion.
This moment in Ho’s artistic evolution feels special—like the expression of releasing one extreme, then another, and finding out what’s in the space between. After fleeing burnout from thirteen years of New York minutes and plunging into the meandering solitude of New Mexico, Ho says she’s learning to find balance.
Ho continues to work as a designer and a fine artist: she has two upcoming gallery shows and just debuted her Southwest Contemporary collaboration. Her work with SWC is her first design project with motifs and graphic elements directly informed by her experiences in New Mexico: a speedy roadrunner, a happy rabbit, a shooting star, a winking sun. Like the characters that invite the viewer into all of her works, these illustrations are specific to this place where the sun and the moon so reliably put on awe-worthy shows as they take their places to say good morning and goodnight.
Ho’s merchandise designs are available for new SWC members as part of the publisher’s five-year anniversary celebration.
