Patty Chang & Ron Athey
Artists Reading: Patty Chang and Ron Athey
February 19th, 4 PM
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X-TRA and Poetic Research Bureau are proud to co-host a reading foregrounding the significant role of artists’ writing and rigorous, experimental prose in Los Angeles. Deploying both the critical and the ekphrastic impulse, artists argue in their own work for the deep relation of visual art to writing practice. Artists Patty Chang and Ron Athey, both well-known for their wide-ranging performances, exhibitions, videos, and narrative films, have been invited to read passages of writings that have been integral to their work. After reading, both artists will be joined in conversation by writers Ana Iwataki and April Baca, who have written cover stories on Chang, and Athey, respectively, for X-TRA.
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Patty Chang is a Los Angeles based artist and educator who uses performance, video, installation and narrative forms when considering identity, gender, transnationalism, colonial legacies, the environment, large-scale infrastructural projects, and impacted subjectivities. Her museum exhibition and book The Wandering Lake investigates the landscapes impacted by large scale human-engineered water projects such as the Soviet mission to irrigate the waters from the Aral Sea, as well as the longest aqueduct in the world, the South to North Water Diversion Project in China. Her most recent collaborative project, Learning Endings, is a multi-part interdisciplinary research that has surfaced amidst the overlapping contexts of climate crisis, threatened ocean ecosystems, and challenges to scientific expertise. It examines the work of scientists who perform necropsies of dead marine mammals as unacknowledged forms of attention and care, and explores how various kinds of art practice can support this care work.
Her work has been exhibited nationwide and internationally at such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; New Museum, New York; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; BAK, Basis voor actuele Kunst, Utrecht; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, England; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Times Museum in Guangzhou, China; and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. She has received a United States Artist Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, a Creative Capital Fellowship, a Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Berlin, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Art and the Environment grant, and an Anonymous Was a Woman Grant. She currently teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA.
Ron Athey, born 1961, is a Los Angeles-based self-taught artist performing since 1981’s Premature Ejaculation noise/action collaboration with the late Rozz Williams. Influenced by the bands Christian Death, and Nervous Gender, Athey came into his own forming a performance troop in the 90s, making the so-called torture trilogy, 3 works that addressed the HIV/AIDS crisis in ritualistic, philosophical, and mythological stage scenes. Martyrs & Saints and 4 Scenes In a Harsh Life were development scene by scene in nightclubs, Deliverance (1995) was an ICA London commission. These works toured internationally including CCA Glasgow, Gallerija Kapelica Ljubljana, Eurokaz Zagreb, Inteatro XX Polverigi, Ex-Teresa CDMX, and Kampnagel Hamburg.
In 1998 Athey began making solo work, premiering The Solar Anus at Galleria Kapelica Ljubljana, onwards through 20 cities until the pivotal Undercover Surrealism show at the Hayward Gallery in London, 2006. Since then Athey has moved between solos, opera collaborations, and a post-porn video project with Hermes Pittakos titled Pasiphäe, Witch Queen of Crete: A Gloryhole Origin Story, which showed in 2022 at the Long Beach Opera Film Festival via Dirty Looks. Two monographs have been printed on Intellect Press: Pleading in the Blood (2013) and Queer Communion (2021) to accompany the same-named Amelia Jones curated retrospective showing that year at Participant Inc. NYC and ICA-LA.
April 19 Athey is facilitating Darkness Visible, a week long immersive 30 person performance workshop at Communitism in Athens, Greece, and has collaborated with Carmina Escobar on her sound recording concept, Vox Clamantis, a non-lingual vocal duet filmed inside and out locations in high desert locations.