On view September 18, 2025 to January 24, 2026

New installation by Patty Chang and David Kelley

Reception: Thursday, September 18, 2025, 5–7 p.m.

Through video, sound, and sculpture, Los Angeles based artists Patty Chang and David Kelley challenge the rigid distinction between humans and nature established by Western science. Instead, the exhibition insists on the inseparability of human and ecological systems. In a time in which environmental justice and climate issues have become increasingly urgent, Our Abyssal Kin situates deep-sea ecology within historical struggles for agency and liberation.

The artists’ four-channel video Stray Dog Hydrophobia (2024) comes to life in the exhibition space, where a sprawling wooden network of ladders and beams scaffolds an array of manufactured and found objects. Poetically referencing a sunken wreck, a whale carcass, or the human nervous system, the installation embodies the intersecting human and more-than-human structures that make up a deep-sea ecosystem.

In 2023, Chang and Kelley travelled to Kingston, Jamaica to observe a meeting of the International Seabed Authority (ISA)—the United Nations global body that regulates deep sea mining. As production of green and digital technologies expands, states and corporations look to new sources for necessary raw materials, such as the ocean floor. The video captured by the artists reveals how international economic procedures reduce the natural world to a mere financial element, ignoring the rich and complex life that the ocean supports. Chang and Kelley’s work situates the ISA’s recent activities within historical patterns of colonialism and extraction—in particular British Jamaica’s trade in sugar and enslaved bodies as well as contributions to early oceanography and natural science. Past and present collide in the exhibition: the exploitation of human labor, trafficked across the sea and turned into profit, backgrounds the ongoing extraction of seaborne material for forces of capital and power.

Our Abyssal Kin also confronts us with the limitations of conventional knowledge by connecting the ocean to be in kinship with humanity. While the ISA positions dredged manganese nodules as simply deposits of transition minerals, these minerals accumulated over millions of years; a time scale vastly exceeding the functional lifespan of a human body or technological artifact. Throughout the installation, the artists intersperse alternative ways of perceiving and knowing. Rather than seeing the ocean as a resource to be consumed, the exhibition offers up the idea of the ocean as an ancestor or even nearer relation. Featured in the video work is a chant by native Hawai’ian elder Solomon Pili Kaho’Ohalahala (“Uncle Sol”) who asserts an Indigenous relation to aquatic environments that situates humans within a horizontal and cross-species network of kin. The artists also present drummers from a historic Maroon community in Jamaica who similarly remind us of the possibility of resisting exploitation. Ultimately, Chang and Kelley relate this genealogy of struggle to the persistence and preciousness of natural life, singular from yet entangled with the tides of human history.

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 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. In addition to numerous awards and fellowships, her work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, New Museum, M+ Museum in Hong Kong, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. She teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA. 

David Kelley’s work traces the hidden ecologies of global infrastructure—from deep-sea mining to the oil sands of Alberta and the extraction of rare earth elements in Inner Mongolia, China. Working across film, photography, installation, and sculpture, he explores how technology, modernity, ecology, and memory operate as dynamic systems of mediation. His projects often involve site-specific production, archival research, and the activation of everyday objects and theatrical constructions within installation environments. Scientific specimens—borrowed from natural history collections or fabricated in glass, ceramic, and stone—anchor his work in material histories while opening spaces for surreal and speculative interventions. His work has been exhibited internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin; and The Bank, Shanghai. Upcoming exhibitions include LACMA in Los Angeles and the Global Visions FotoFest Biennial 2026 in Houston. Kelley holds an MFA from UC Irvine and was a 2010–11 Whitney ISP fellow. 

Many thanks to San Jose Museum of Art for premiering an early rendition of the project, Beta Space: Patty Chang and David Kelley, November 2, 2024 to June 1, 2025.

This exhibition is supported in part by a grant from the Pasadena Art Alliance.

Stray Dog Hydrophobia was made possible through a grant from LACMA Art + Technology

Programming