Error Theories
Error Theories was created by Conrad Cheung, a former potter, who now creates installations that showcase his personal philosophies. Cheung’s work consists of collected artifacts investigating culture from the past and present.
About the Artist: Conrad Cheung makes mixed-media installations. He received a BA and BFA from Alfred University in 2018. He likes putting things where they don’t belong, and especially likes keeping autobiographies short and dry.
From the Artist: A historiographer’s nightmare, my work culls source material from past periods and current life. Troubles of all sorts motivate this culling: self-conscious sentimentality, discontent with certain visions of history, puzzlement over class-relative desires, and disaffection with identity politics.
I gather and remake the stuff of material culture: artifacts of assorted provenance, some iconic and some obscure. These objects amass in scenes where they coexist in uneasy and barely explicable ways. The scenes try, among other things, to metaphorize a familiar and badly skewed conception of what's ‘out there’: that postmodern vision in which everything takes part in some grand non sequitur, and is forever irresolvable into epistemic clarity, and always runs the risk of being a fake, yadda yadda. Most of these claims are deeply confused, but to be sure, the picture of the world they conjure is an attractive distortion.
The work is a revisionist jumble: tableaux of souvenirs, surrogate figures, architecture, and landscape in planned disjunction and disarray. It stages two dramas at once: a higher-order one about the deep confusion in certain ideological visions of the past and present, and a lower-order one about the not so deep confusion of living amid so much stuff. What turns up in the scenes is a variety of registers, from the high to the low in cultural taste, and from the institutional to the lyric-confessional in genre. Something stranger ends up accompanying this riot of too much stuff and too much talk: an ambivalent feeling about being here and now.
Exhibition ran September 15th-30th 2018
