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16/1/2000

ALBERT CHONG ACROSS THE VOID

Light work, Syracuse, NY

At first glance the chaotic clutter in Albert Chong's studio echoes the romantic notion we hold of sun filled rooms where artists rub raw materials into precious commodities of creation. Slides spill over counters, books are crammed onto every shelf, the odor of linseed oil penetrates from the studio below, and boxes of prints fill every space and file cabinet to overflowing. As Chong enters the studio from a short walk across the University of Colorado's campus at Boulder and brushes the snowflakes from his dreadlocks the studio takes on the feel of a sanctuary where "objects and materials [are] gathered and absorbed within the process of living,"(1) not merely assembled in the process of making art.

Over the past 20 years Albert Chong has literally and figuratively built a body of work out of the memories, objects, and beliefs of a life lived as opposed to one simply imagined. The remains of an evening meal might become the centerpiece for the next day's still life, or an ornament for an elaborate installation next year. Family photographs may appear in complex collages or simple arrangements where flowers are gently placed within the frame and rephotographed to resemble a remembrance of a life passed or a celebration of current or ongoing achievement. Chong himself often appears as a character within the frame in various apparitions from patriarch, to shaman, to a whisper of an image moving across the scene like smoke exhaled, lingered, and gone. Intermixed with these more ephemeral images are straightforward portraits made of residents who live along Shelly Road in Bamboo, Saint Ann, a place remembered and revisited from his youthful days growing up in Jamaica.

The work in this exhibition touches on many themes and practices that have been central to contemporary art production over the past twenty years including the expressive search for personal identity, cultural affirmation and exploration, the self-portrait, and the invented tableau. Even though Chong is a tenured professor, and his photographs and installations are regularly exhibited in contemporary art galleries and museums, his work seems to spring from a different well than many of his contemporaries. His work gathers together emotion, poetry, mysticism and mythology and makes them visible. His work never seems like it was created on the back of academic theory but has the feeling that his scenes have been revealed or discovered after a long rest in some ancient and secret place. His techniques for achieving these effects range from subtly manipulating the processing of the Polaroid positive/negative film he prefers in his black and white work to exaggerating contrast, density, and scale in his final prints. But for the most part Chong feels his way through the process of creating images, and as the poet Quincy Troupe has written:

Chong's photographs are ultimately a very personal and poetic invocation of the African and Chinese traditions that he grew up with in his native Jamaica. They are highly ritualized, improvised narratives that make both religious and secular connotations. They feed the spirits of both ancestral and living appetites.
They illuminate commonplace elements that are, through his magical, shamanistic eyes, transmogrified and transformed into objects of worship.(2)

Chong's portraits of residents who live along Shelly Road in the parish of Saint Ann, Jamaica are some of the most recent and accessible works in the exhibition. At first these carefully considered studies, made with a 4x5 camera on a tripod, seem like a radical departure from the rest of the work in the exhibition. But with these portraits Chong has connected his internal life of beliefs and imagination with the more prosaic realities of daily life in present-day Jamaica. Woven into the exhibition the portraits seem to make his still lifes less exotic, while the portraits benefits from the power they absorb from the tableau images that surround them.
Together they become part of a process that is a visual testament to living, believing, and imagining both within and beyond his ancestral home.

In the exhibition catalogue there is a passage written by Chong and a snapshot of his father. In the passage Chong offers his father an apology for not giving him the snapshot before his father died. He ends the statement by asking, "How could a photograph mean so much?" This lament is perhaps the essential guide we need to enter into Chong's outpouring of images.

Jeffrey Hoone, Director Light Work

LIGHT WORK - 316 WAVERLY AVENUE - SYRACUSE, NY 13244
(315) 443-1300 - FAX: (315) 443-9516

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