Patty Chang

BANK NYC, New York, USA

- Louis Bury

Patty Chang’s spartan BANK NYC exhibition, ‘Touch Archive’, proves quite touching, if not always in the intended ways. Its centrepiece, We Are All Mothers (2022), is a ruminative 20-minute video essay based on a collaborative research project, Learning Endings (2022-ongoing), that the artist undertook with veterinary pathologist Aleksija Neimanis and cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis. On a nearby table sits Memory Game (2022), a grid of 16 facedown photographs depicting the veterinarian’s gloved hand touching deceased harbour porpoises; the exhibition didactics encourage visitors to flip over the photographs, two at a time, to reveal and try to match the images. The inter-active artwork instantiates the video's haptic theories, but the video itself suggests that art’s power actually derives from the intellectual distance that mediation affords.

A substantial amount of the touch depicted in