Strange Attractor recontextualizes an amalgam of historical figures including Balthus, Edmonia Lewis, Jean Sieberg, David Lynch, and Audre Lorde. Citing both Balthus and Lewis evokes two vastly different ways of metabolizing the “muse.” The film is structured around one night that thee filmmaker and their much older white benefactor spend driving in Washington D.C. around the neighborhood surrounding the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where Edmonia Lewis’ magnum opus The Death of Cleopatra is on view.  Chapter One opens to an image of Ouyang smoking in a car passenger seat, chauffeured along dimly lit streets (orbiting the museum in a mile radius) by an elderly man with white hair and glasses. What follows is almost rhapsodic: a increasingly esoteric conversation about “strange attractors” in astronomical predictive modeling is overset with dialogue from David Lynch’s 1990 screenplay Wild At Heart; extracts from Phillippe Garrel’s 1974 film Les hautes solitudes segues into recitation of Audre Lorde’s “A Song for Many Movements." In another chapter, Ouyang and a troubling acquaintance named “J” overstep a museum stanchion to find Balthus’ infamously transgressive painting of twelve-year-old Therese Blanchard. Ouyang’s video is, in many regards, the exact sort of “chaos story” that the artist describes: “In these stories, the modernist bulwark of remedy, progress, and professionalism cracks to reveal vulnerability, futility, and impotence.”

Cato Ouyang engages object-making, interdisciplinary environments, and time-based projects. Their practice embraces an array of materials including hand-carved wood and stone, paint, appropriated literature and film, family secrets, animal parts, antiques, and a full-scale replica of a trench toilet, presented with varying degrees of legibility. Against affirmational conventions of representation and repair, the works instigate relation through violation. Ouyang has held solo exhibitions at: Night Gallery, Los Angeles; No Place Gallery, Columbus, OH; Lyles & King, New York; the Knockdown Center, Queens; and Make Room, Los Angeles. Their work has been included in group shows at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, CA; Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D, Portland, Maine; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Capsule, Venice; James Fuentes Gallery, New York; Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles; and others. Ouyang’s work has been featured in publications including the New York Times, Artforum, Flash Art, Momus, Sculpture Magazine, Document Journal, Art Review, and Frieze. Their work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; High Museum, Atlanta, GA; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX; Columbus Museum of Art; Kadist Foundation, San Francisco; Faurschou Foundation, Copenhagen; Pond Society, Shanghai; and X Museum, Beijing. Ouyang received an MFA from Yale University and is based in New York. They are represented by Lyles & King in New York and Night Gallery in Los Angeles.