Young Chung is the founder of Commonwealth and Council.
The oral history of Patricia Fernández Carcedo was a focused interview surrounding the development of Box (a proposition for ten years). A capsule of a ten-year work-in-progress and exchange between Patricia Fernández Carcedo and the recipient of the box's contents, Young Chung, located in Los Angeles. The items include a variety of letters, found and created objects, and paintings.
As in previous years, with the artwork, Box (a proposition for 10 years), viewers are invited to peruse the letters, drawings, and newly added items over the past year. In 2020 AOHG included two vinyl recordings: one contains interviews with Fernández and Chung (led by LACA’s Director, Hailey Loman) covering the project’s origins and ongoing relationship with Commonwealth and Council; the other memorializes Box (a proposition for ten years) through Fernández’s reflections on eight years of correspondence and object sharing, offering insight into the box’s own archive, the ephemera that comprise and reveal an interpersonal relationship, and the underlying logic binding archivist and artist.
At Commonwealth and Council January 7, 2020 the audio plays on a hand-carved wooden record player, made of walnut and similar to the box itself, with an incised the x-motif shared across the artist’s and her grandfather’s practices. Three banners serve as a Finding Aid or map, collating information on the archive’s contents and system of organization to assist visitors navigating the materials. Through this audio and archive installation in the gallery, we inquire how ephemera can reveal the nuances of an interpersonal relationship between two people. This includes promises between the artist and Commonwealth and Council as well as terms binding the archivist and the artist. It invites the viewer of these materials to consider where the work of archiving ends, and the creation of new work begins. It asks: how does someone archive a relationship—with a space, with a friend— an exchange of objects, unanswered letters, and things left unspoken.
I removed a lot of the phrase, “you know” to create a more readable transcript. I do however feel that this is an important choice of language that Chung chose to communicate with me.