Integrating video projection, photography, sculpture, publication and performance into one expansive body of work, Los Angeles–based Patty Chang (born 1972) examines the complex way stories develop through geography, history, cultural mythology, fiction and personal experience.
Accompanying her exhibition of the multiyear project A Wandering Lake at the Queens Museum that was in part inspired by turn-of-the-century colonial explorer Sven Hedin’s book Wandering Lake (1938)—which tells the story of a migrating body of water in the Chinese desert—this book alludes to the loss of Chang’s father, as well as her pregnancy and the birth of her son. The artist’s book, combining Chang’s writings and travel photographs with historic and theoretical text excerpts as well as photographs of her sculptures and watercolors, is a personal, associative, narrative meditation on mourning, caregiving and landscape.
Featured image is reproduced from 'Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Hyperallergic
Louis Bury
Excerpts from the exquisitely designed artist’s book, published by Dancing Foxes Press, appear throughout the exhibition. Most of the wall labels, for example, eschew interpretive descriptions of individual artworks and instead feature an apposite block quote from the book, and the entire voice-over script of the thirteen-minute film 'Configurations' derives from the book. These piecemeal texts amplify the backstory but can’t express how the book, as a whole, evocatively integrates the project’s multitude of discursive registers. If the exhibition is like a partially completed jigsaw puzzle, then the book, with its imbricated layers of image and text, is an image of the completed puzzle.
The New York Review of Books
Erin Shwartz
This is a guide to mourning; but Chang widens the scope to include political conflict and environmental degradation, and argues that, despite the losses we’ve incurred, we are still collaborators in the making of our worlds.
Featured image is reproduced from Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake, an artists-book-as-travelogue/exhibition-catalogue published to accompany the acclaimed one-person show currently on view at the Queens Museum. Poetic, melancholic, and sometimes darkly humorous, both the show and the book allude to gender fluidity, climate change, migration, Chang’s pregnancy, the birth of her son, and the death of her father. “This is a guide to mourning,” Erin Schwartz writes in the New York Review of Books Daily, “but Chang widens the scope to include political conflict and environmental degradation, and argues that, despite the losses we’ve incurred, we are still collaborators in the making of our worlds.” continue to blog
FORMAT: Pbk, 7.5 x 9.75 in. / 96 pgs / 90 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $24.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $33.95 ISBN: 9780998632636 PUBLISHER: Dancing Foxes Press/Queens Museum AVAILABLE: 11/21/2017 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Published by Dancing Foxes Press/Queens Museum. Afterword by Hitomi Iwasaki.
Integrating video projection, photography, sculpture, publication and performance into one expansive body of work, Los Angeles–based Patty Chang (born 1972) examines the complex way stories develop through geography, history, cultural mythology, fiction and personal experience.
Accompanying her exhibition of the multiyear project A Wandering Lake at the Queens Museum that was in part inspired by turn-of-the-century colonial explorer Sven Hedin’s book Wandering Lake (1938)—which tells the story of a migrating body of water in the Chinese desert—this book alludes to the loss of Chang’s father, as well as her pregnancy and the birth of her son. The artist’s book, combining Chang’s writings and travel photographs with historic and theoretical text excerpts as well as photographs of her sculptures and watercolors, is a personal, associative, narrative meditation on mourning, caregiving and landscape.
