September 05, 2025
ArtCenter College of Design Presents Our Abyssal Kin— A New Installation By Los Angeles Artists Patty Chang and David Kelley
On view September 18, 2025 – January 24, 2026
In the College’s Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 18, 2025 from 5–7 p.m.
Los Angeles, CA - ArtCenter College of Design is pleased to present Our Abyssal Kin, a new installation by artists Patty Chang and David Kelley on view at the College’s Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery from September 18, 2025 through January 24, 2026. Through video, sound, and sculpture, Chang and 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. At a time when 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 with a sprawling wooden network of ladders and beams variously resembling a sunken wreck, a whale carcass, or the human nervous system. When considered as a whole, 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 of 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 people 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 positioning 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 timescale 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”) that 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 practice draws on essay film, experimental ethnography, and experimental theater, treating form as a space for affective experience and transgression. Kelley approaches research as a generative aesthetic process, privileging sensorial and speculative modes over purely discursive ones. 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.
Stray Dog Hydrophobia was made possible through a grant from LACMA Art + Technology.
EXHIBITION DATES & OPENING RECEPTION
Our Abyssal Kin
September 18, 2025 - January 24, 2026
Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery
ArtCenter College of Design, Hillside Campus
1700 Lida Street, Pasadena, CA 91103
Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Saturday | Noon–5 p.m.
Admission is FREE
Opening Reception
Thursday, September 18, 2025 from 5–7 p.m.
RELATED EVENTS
Stray Dog Hydrophobia Live Musical Performance and Film Installation
Thursday, November 6, 2025 at 7 p.m.
LACMA Smidt Welcome Plaza
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036
Presented by LACMA Art + Technology
Patty Chang and David Kelley’s live musical performance and monumental four-screen film installation, Stray Dog Hydrophobia, will take place outdoors beside LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries in the Smidt Family Plaza for one night only on Thursday, November 6 at 7 p.m. Event is free. Contact lab@lacma.org for more information.
Chang and Kelley filmed in and off the coast of Jamaica, in London, Southampton, and Oxford, England. Surrounded by four projections, a live chorus of vocalists, percussionists, and horn players will synchronously perform a composition for Stray Dog Hydrophobia amongst the audience. The one-hour-long event weaves live performance, instrumentation, with the diegetic recordings in the film.
Immersed in four surrounding projections, audiences will experience a rare fusion of live music, narration, and film. The performance—featuring composer Yasna Yamaoka Vismale’s score of ethereal vocals, Afro-Jamaican drum rhythms, free jazz, West African influences, and Maroon music—will be brought to life by a chorus of musicians and dramatic narrators. Together, they resist violent histories and present challenges while carrying a note of hope for the ocean’s future.
About ArtCenter Exhibitions
ArtCenter Exhibitions includes the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery at the Hillside Campus in Pasadena above the Rose Bowl, the Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery, the Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography Gallery and the Hutto-Patterson Exhibition Hall at the South Campus a mile from Old Pasadena. These curated spaces embody ArtCenter's institutional will to understand artistic thinking and design strategies as levers in promoting social advancement, the pursuit of humanitarian innovation, and the use of critical inquiry to clarify objectives and truths. Using the lens of contemporary art and design, the mission of ArtCenter Exhibitions is to ignite emotional resonance, provoke intellectual dissonance and conjure unexpected pathways of thinking.
About ArtCenter
Founded in 1930 and located in Pasadena, California, ArtCenter College of Design is a global leader in art and design education. ArtCenter offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in a wide variety of industrial design disciplines as well as visual and applied arts. Renowned for both its ties to industry and its social impact initiatives, ArtCenter is the first design school to receive the United Nations’ Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) status. Throughout the College’s long and storied history, ArtCenter alumni have had a profound impact on popular culture, the way we live and important issues in our society.
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