Christy Chan: Whose Comfort? | October 7 – January 25

 In 2022, Christy Chan’s Fainting Couch Project traveled to art centers around the Bay Area as an interactive platform for participants to reflect on fragility, privilege and abuse of power in the United States.

Participants were invited to rest on an object that historically functioned to idealize fragility. In a reversal of the fainting couch’s exclusionary history, the project was open to people of all backgrounds. The video project Whose Comfort? documents this participatory work, depicting nearly 80 Bay Area residents interacting with this fraught object.

In the nineteenth century, fainting couches were status symbols in the homes of upper-class Americans. During Victorian times, women of privilege practiced corseting, which restricted blood flow, and the loss of consciousness was normalized and celebrated as “beauty.” On the other hand, many working-class Americans could not afford or need a fainting couch. Working-class women did not uniformly practice corseting because they needed to breathe in order to work in factories and homes. A domestic servant in a home, for instance, was not allowed to sit on, much less rest on, this specialized piece of furniture.

Chan’s Fainting Couch is an 1890s antique that she re-upholstered with a custom textile design. At first glance, the fabric appears luxurious, inviting and beautiful, but upon close inspection, the textile depicts a surreal collage of birds and humans in corseted states.

Through this hybrid art object-community project, Chan invites us to reflect: Who gets to be fragile and who has to stay strong? How are notions of “tradition” and lifestyle still used to codify violence?  How is power still hidden as powerlessness?  And, finally, how do we come together to break and dismantle traditions built on racism?