After-Hours Tour: Phil Chang on Five Centuries of Works on Paper

Museums are different after closing. The light changes, the guards relax, and the rooms stop feeling like a place you are visiting and start feeling like somewhere you were let into. That is most of why an after-hours tour is worth rearranging a Thursday for. The other reason is who is leading it: Phil Chang is an artist whose whole practice is about photographic materials failing on purpose - images that fade, paper that refuses to hold the picture - which makes him a genuinely strange and good choice to walk a group through five hundred years of drawings and prints. Expect him to talk about surfaces and decay rather than subjects and dates. Chang teaches at Art Center and shows with Praz-Delavallade, and he is the rare artist who can talk about a Rembrandt etching and a bleached-out C-print as the same problem. The group size is whatever fits comfortably in a gallery, so it is worth being early rather than on time. Free admission, six o'clock, Thursday October 1, at the Hammer in Westwood.