Patty Chang: Touch Archive

BANK NYC is pleased to present Touch Archive, an exhibition of works by Patty Chang that will inaugurate the gallery’s New York pilot program. Touch Archive is the New York debut of Chang’s recent works, exemplifying the Los Angeles-based artist’s multidisciplinary practice across performance, video, photography, and installation. Building on Chang’s long history with the gallery, Touch Archive is the seventh time the artist has exhibited with the gallery since her inclusion in BANK’s very first show in 2013. Concurrent with the BANK NYC exhibition, Chang is also unveiling a new commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, opening on March 24, 2025.

Touch Archive centers on Chang’s video essay, We Are All Mothers (2022), comprising her reflections on Learning Endings, a larger collaborative research project between Chang, veterinary pathologist Aleksija Neimanis, and cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis. The project layers scientific, artistic, and theoretical perspectives to investigate communal mourning, the passage of intergenerational trauma, and approaches to multispecies care and repair.

We Are All Mothers emerged from pandemic-era virtual meetings where the three researchers conducted and observed harbor porpoise necropsies—dissections performed to determine the animals’ cause of death. Neimanis’s reports on porpoise deaths caused by bycatch, environmental pollutants, or disease form a database to prevent further species loss. As a collective, the researchers asked Neimanis to perform a ritual of touch before the necropsies, placing a comforting hand on the animal and incorporating afterlife care into her scientific protocol. Chang considers the intimacy of this gesture, positing the possibility of a “touch archive” in the body, created by memories of touch from body to body—or, in this case, from gloved hand to animal skin.

Images of the scientist’s hand holding the heads, flippers, and remains of the porpoises compose a visual touch archive, an empathetic companion to the veterinary necropsy database. The images from the touch archive are reproduced in the gallery as photographic snapshots, laid out for visitors to flip over and interact with. The installation borrows the mechanics of a memory game, requiring a physical engagement with the cards and recollection of the images when hidden from sight. The exercise reproduces the rituals of the touch archive, which in turn prods the audience to form new networks of touch memories.

Alongside this tactile intimacy, We Are All Mothers meditates profoundly on fear and love, emotions Chang often revisits throughout her practice. She expands on her troubling thoughts in an earlier work, Things I’m Scared of Right Now (2018), which features a list of fears prompted by her experience of heatwaves and wildfires in Los Angeles. From “public speaking” to “Leroy’s future death” to “Fire, dying in a fire,” the work cultivates an empathetic space to document and purge human, motherly, and environmental anxieties, even foreshadowing the artist’s displacement due to the 2025 Eaton Fire.

Patty Chang’s works divulge these fearful possibilities, from the paralyzing concerns that emerge from one’s transition into motherhood to the global ecological crisis and our human impact. Yet, her work also calls for new activations from unease, exploring new modes of environmental conservation, an expansive understanding of motherhood and care for other beings, and a consideration for those often unseen.

Chang’s exploration of human and environmental connection is continued in BANK NYC’s second-floor group exhibition, Braided Stream, curated by Yuan Fuca. Like Chang, the 10 featured artists investigate the various ecological relationships arising from migration, spirituality, environmental transformation, conservation, and decay.