ALBERT CHONG

ACROSS THE VOID

January 17 - March 24, 2000
Contact Sheet 105

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 Albert 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. It 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 suggests that his scenes have been revealed or discovered after a long rest in some ancient and secret place.

Aunt Winnie, 1995

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. 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.