Momenta Art is pleased to present a new video installation by Patty Chang on view from March 17- March 27, 2011.

Patty Chang examines the psychic and physical spaces of labor and production. By juxtaposing images of workers peacefully sleeping or resting in the spaces where they work, Chang explores how a space, specifically the workplace, is affected by the energy present. This exploration serves as a kind of refusal of production through not working and maybe even dreaming. This work also highlights the potential danger inherent in equating production with progress and self worth.

Join us Sunday, March 20th at 3PM for a collaborative performance in conjunction with Patty Chang’s video installation.

Dead Tired: Sleep Texts of Patty Chang and Thomas Devaney explores artists’ labor through free-floating apparitions between waking and sleep. Reveries, exhaustion, blankness, misspellings and misunderstandings, cat naps, and the fertile if anxious territory between an artist and a poet are the raw material from which Chang and Devaney will present a new performance on Sunday March 20, 2011.

Patty Chang: If i wrap me back up one will never know i was opened. Thomas Devaney: The morning is a spell I cannot doubt. So youre wrapped & have always been so. and now i’m fucked on my txt limit.

Patty Chang is well known for her performative works, which deal with themes of gender, sexuality, language and empathy. Working predominantly in video Chang initially uses the medium to document her performances, often utilizing the camera’s potential to misrepresent. Her works often challenge viewers’ perceptions of what they see, frequently creating visual sleights of hand that highlight fantastical representations of “Asia”. More recently she has taken more of an off-screen role, shooting Shangri-La, a 2005 video documenting various attempts to recreate its eponymous subject, in the real life Shangri-La, a town in China’s Yunnan province renamed in 2002 to attract tourism. Chang’s work has been exhibited internationally. She is currently working on a multichannel video with David Kelley about hair washing, modernization and a road built through Northern Laos.

Thomas Devaney is the author of two poetry collections A Series of Small Boxes (Fish Drum) and The American Pragmatist Fell in Love (Banshee Press), and a nonfiction book, Letters to Ernesto Neto (Germ Folios). Projects with the Institute of Contemporary Art (Phila) include “Poe’s Empty House,” for The Big Nothing (2004) and “No Silence Here, Enjoy the Silence,” Locally Localized Gravity (2007).Other projects include poems written for “Common Ground: Eight Philadelphia Photographers in the 1960s and 1970s” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2009). He is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Haverford College and is the editor of ONandOnScreen (poems + videos) http://onandonscreen.net/. Thomas Devaney’s website is http://www.thomasdevaney.net/