Change Order, 2024, 35mm slides, auto advance slide projector, text, found objects, PVC curtains, steel frames, silkscreen prints on hand-dyed paper; 6 minute loop; dimensions variable. Photo credit: Zeshan Ahmed.

“My films are the celebration of reality, of life, of my friends, of actual daily life that passes and is gone tomorrow.” - Jonas Mekas

Change Order is a film that does not involve a film; but rather everything around it. It’s a work which questions ideas surrounding means of productions; value; and the re-distribution of value.

When you look into a building you can see a world. Change Order centers on a micro-history of a warehouse in Glendale, Queens. My entry point is one of friendship and subversion. A close friend and artist Serena Chang has her studio and art production business in part of the warehouse; in the second half of it her family runs their family hosiery business, Sheerly Touch-ya.

Sheerly. Serena’s father, James Chang started the New York-based hosiery business in the 1990s shortly after immigrating from Taiwan. Up until his recent retirement, the business was a true family endeavor: James designed the packaging and graphics himself by hand. Some of the products were shot on models in Taiwan, others James shot himself in the business’ warehouse in Glendale, Queens. Touch-ya. His wife helped bookkeep and he and his children delivered the stockings to stores in a van marked Sheerly Touch-Ya. 

When I began working with Serena Chang on material for Change Order, I asked her for images and documents from the archive of her family hosiery business that are outside of the final packaged products that line the shelves of dollar stores in New York.

I asked Serena to include images from photo shoots that were discarded. Send process graphics, sales order forms, drawings, designs that never graced the shelves, and so on. This in combination with material from Shisanwu’s art production archive, create a portrait of a place in which issues surrounding immigration, labor, aesthetics, and authorship change and shift, their complexity never easily resolved

James Chang’s sketch of his warehouse from memory (Taipei), silkscreen on hand dyed paper, 12 1/2” × 9 1/4”, 2024

Shisanwu LLC sketches on Sheerly Touch-Ya Invoice, silkscreen on hand-dyed paper, 14 3/8” × 20 3/8”, 2024

Sales Order – Sheerly Touch-Ya, silkscreen on hand dyed paper, 14 3/8” × 20 3/8”, 2024