“Stray Dog Hydrophobia” film still, 2023–24 (Photo – Patty Chang and David Kelley)
ArtCenter College of Design presents Our Abyssal Kin, a new installation by artists Patty Chang and David Kelley, on view at the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery from September 18, 2025 through January 24, 2026.
By News Desk
Through video, sound, and sculpture, Chang and Kelley challenge the rigid divide between humans and nature imposed by Western science. Instead, the exhibition insists on the interdependence of human and ecological systems. At a time when environmental justice and climate change are increasingly urgent, Our Abyssal Kin connects deep-sea ecology to historical struggles for agency and liberation.
At the center of the installation is the artists’ four-channel video Stray Dog Hydrophobia (2024), embedded in a sprawling sculptural network of wooden ladders, beams, and a mix of found and fabricated objects. This scaffolded environment evokes a sunken shipwreck, a whale carcass, or even the human nervous system, embodying the intertwined, more-than-human structures of deep-sea ecosystems.
In 2023, Chang and Kelley traveled to Kingston, Jamaica, to observe a meeting of the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the United Nations body regulating deep-sea mining. As global demand for green and digital technologies grows, corporations and states are turning to the ocean floor for rare minerals. The artists’ footage documents how these international processes reduce nature to mere economic resource, disregarding the complex life the ocean sustains. Their work links the ISA’s activities to long-standing histories of colonialism and extraction, including British Jamaica’s involvement in the sugar trade, slavery, and the development of early oceanography. Past and present intersect: the exploitation of human labor once trafficked across the sea echoes today’s extraction of seabed materials for global capital.
The exhibition also challenges conventional knowledge systems, positioning the ocean not as a resource, but as kin. While the ISA views manganese nodules as “transition minerals,” the exhibition reminds us that these minerals form over millions of years—far outlasting human technologies. Chang and Kelley intersperse the installation with alternative ways of knowing and relating. Featured in the video is a chant by Native Hawaiian elder Solomon Pili Kahoʻohalahala (“Uncle Sol”), who voices an Indigenous understanding of aquatic environments, placing humans within a horizontal, cross-species network of kinship. Also included are drummers from a historic Jamaican Maroon community, evoking resistance to colonial exploitation.
Ultimately, Our Abyssal Kin traces a lineage of struggle and survival across human and nonhuman life. The artists suggest that liberation—from exploitation, from environmental destruction—requires a recognition of deep entanglement across species, histories, and systems.
About the Artists
Patty Chang is a Los Angeles-based artist and educator whose work spans performance, video, installation, and narrative. Her practice explores identity, gender, colonial histories, transnationalism, and the environment. Her recent collaborative project Learning Endings explores ocean ecosystems, climate crisis, and the limits of scientific authority. Chang’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, New Museum, M+ in Hong Kong, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm. She is a professor at the University of Southern California.
David Kelley works across film, photography, installation, and sculpture to investigate the hidden ecologies of global infrastructure—from deep-sea mining to the oil sands of Alberta and rare-earth extraction in Inner Mongolia. His work draws on essay film, experimental ethnography, and theater to explore intersections of technology, ecology, and memory. Kelley’s installations often incorporate archival research, site-specific production, and scientific specimens, real and fabricated, to open space for speculative, sensorial inquiry. His work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, and The Bank in Shanghai. Upcoming exhibitions include LACMA and the 2026 Global Visions FotoFest Biennial in Houston. Kelley holds an MFA from UC Irvine and was a 2010–11 Whitney ISP fellow.
Our Abyssal Kin Opening Reception September 18, 2025 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm On View September 18, 2025 - January 24, 2026 Wednesday – Saturday 12:00 pm - 5:00 pm Location Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery ArtCenter College of Design, Hillside Campus 1700 Lida St. Pasadena, CA 91103 Admission is free.
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