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David Kelley, Patty Chang

Spiritual Myopia

Film expérimental | hdv | couleur | 15:0 | USA | 2018

Spiritual Myopia is a film dealing with the invisible labor and desire of the residents of the oil industry boom towns of Fort McMurray in the Canadian Tar Sands and the refining town of Port Arthur Texas. The two cities are terminal nodes of the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline which would span the United States. Fort McMurray is the third largest oil deposit in the world. Its rapid pace of growth has meant a dearth of housing for its migrant workers. Port Arthur boasts the world’s largest concentration of oil refineries and its town center has nearly disintegrated from economic decline. These twin cities are related spatially as nodes in the same energy infrastructure, and temporally in their different stages of a boom or bust economy. Borrowing its title from Alfred Stieglitz’s photo Spiritual America, Spiritual Myopia speaks to the nearsightedness innate to hypercapitalism.

Spiritual Myopia is a collaboration between artists David Kelley and Patty Chang Patty Chang (Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) Patty Chang is an artist working in performance, video, writing, and installation. Her work has a capacity to explore complex subjects nearly simultaneously, as does life. Her work has been exhibited nationwide and internationally at such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; New Museum, New York; BAK, Basis voor actuele Kunst, Utrecht, the Netherlands; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Fri Art Centre d’Art de Freibourg, Fribourg, Switzerland; Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, England David Kelley (Lives in Los Angeles California, CA.) David Kelley’s work is a hybrid of experimental documentary and ethnographic practices that make use of imaginary, choreographic and performative strategies. His work has been shown in galleries throughout the world. Recently, he has had exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, White Box in Portland Oregon, and Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles. Other recent exhibitions include The Bank in Shanghai, New Art Center, the de Cordova Biennial in Boston, BAK in Utrecht, MAAP space in Brisbane Australia.