WINGED EVOCATIONS
A kinetic sculptural installation work
Essay by Johnny Coleman.
I first walked into Albert Chong's studio ten years ago, and found myself
surrounded by empty eggshells, cowries, a monkey skull, ruff-hand fashioned
clay figurines, and cod fish skins. I asked him about his work, and he said
that it's everything that I could see... 
There were trays of slides, and a
few print/sketches of ideas in progress pinned to the wall. But from our
first meeting, I was drawn by the physical presence of the objects that he
manipulated. Objects and materials gathered and absorbed within the process of living, then retained for their resonance.
The music was always on. Still is.
For some time now, I've found myself looking into windows of transitional
space when engaged by Chong's work: some threshold of becoming. From the
I-Traits with their visual evidence of spirits not quite seen, to the large
format images of Thrones printed full frame, reading like imprints stamped by
the flash of some time traveling x-ray. This work haunts me.
The self portraiture series -- the I Traits, seem intent on marking fluid traces of momentary convergences. Here, the singular "I" dissipates from Chong's own image, into an extended brotherhood of many beings inhabiting multiple time frames... an apparition revealing itself as the bonding of all kindred possibility: ancient & yet 2 B... Here. In this moment.
Speaking of one image from the series, Ayinde and I, Quincy Troupe writes:
"In contemplation of this shadow-ghost-man passing through these frames, one might be induced to question its identity. Is it Chong himself, or the reinvention or reincarnation of Chong's father, or grandfather, or great grandfather, or great-great grandfather on and on backwards and forward to the future..."
A tactile sense of belief is enacted within this work-or more accurately, a clear insight into truths that cannot be spoken-though you may catch a glimpse from the corner of your eye. What I find most beautiful is Chong's lack of self consciousness in revealing the remnants of energies existing outside of the limits of rational expectation. These images call to the (re)membered tradition & pieced together practices of Africans in the west seeking wholeness... from Congo Square to Cuba down to Bahia to Haiti to Jamaica and over again to the Georgia coast: no explanation necessary. Chong possesses an incredible confidence, and it is evident with the work: beautiful and mysterious.
.............................................. At different points in my life, I have thought about the specificity of place, it's character, the energies of the individuals and the gatherings of individuals who inhabit a particular space. I can remember peculiarities of so many physical and psychic landscapes within my own life. I have been marked by trees, fences, dogs, Saturday morning rituals, and so many people: by a tone of voice, a glance across the kitchen table. And I've thought about chairs... I can describe so many of them. Some creak within hidden spaces where there used to be glue: pegs loose or something. Some plastic, or plump and dusty, with seams threatening to give up. Albert has shown me chairs covered with the stretched skins of salted cod fish: sharp, brittle leather with fins that look like small wings.
Chairs cloaked with the curling nails of pine cones: petals laid as reptilian scales. Some of his chairs have shadows that glow from within their crevices, as if the blackest black radiates light. Chairs draped with dreads that emanate auras enshrining memories: A Throne for the Justice. I find it difficult to perceive of these personages as inanimate objects. What do they remember? How do they speak? Betye Saar once showed me a chair that rocked back and forth with nobody seated there (and it was cold in that room). Can a chair be a ghost? or call to the spirits? or materialize from the fabric of draped crokus cloth... Chong suggests that spirits return to people and places they love: that spirits sustain us, nourish us, are (re)membered by us, and that their presence gives us the capacity to become whole.
In 1991, Chong constructed an offering of Sunday Dinner for the Ancestors, one year after the passing of his father, known simply as the Justice. I believe that there was a place for the Justice at the table. The conductivity of copper clothed the surface with a medium of transmission casting warm honey colored light. An opened bottle sits next to another. Glasses filled: one with gin, the other, rum. A cigar is placed at each setting. And a plate of cod fish, rice, and peas. Libations were poured, and sprayed: cigar smoke hovering in the four corners of the room. A warm soft fog of down clings to the floor: chicken feathers bound and not bound by a circle of the same limestone that makes up the low walls in the countryside beyond Kingston. Those walls changing later to a ring of fresh fruit: a further offering of attendance to those no longer of this world. My sense of time shifts and stays.
There is communion here. Shadows dance on the walls. The scent of rum and fresh tobacco leaf fills the room with a vibe that calls up laughter and familiarity: the weight of the sun heavy on the horizon. Another gathering of folks getting ready to really eat. Sunday dinner. Regular as the cycles of the moon. And each place setting is charged with transience.
I was present in that space when we raised a glass together, and poured some on the floor. I drew smoke. And wondered about the sisters, the aunties, fathers and grandfathers, becoming a congregation of spirits dancing around and within Chong. Smoke rings. I find myself drawn back to the I Traits. I return to Troupe's insights, and realize that in some sense, Sunday Dinner, much like the Thrones are portraits of multiple selves: kindred chi-anima-ashe' flowing within and extending from Chong in the present moment. He becomes both the conduit, and the energies expressed. This fluid dance requires a spirit/mind that has found the capacity to surrender its grasp upon expectation. A disciplined focus upon the present moment is the challenge of letting go: listening from inside of the stream. Within both his process, and the substance of his imagery, Chong operates improvisationally: the vital beings that occupy these layered spaces gradually emerge from shifting conversations with themselves to reveal a confluence that shifts and curls as it floats through time. I sense traces of a singular presence existing in a simultaneity of here, there, and in between. A connection. There is an inner stillness that centers & grounds Chong. It is the place that he watches & listens from... it may have grown as a result of the training that he received for years as a youth. He is a martial artist: a quiet warrior linked in a lineage that jumps back to his paternal grandfather, said to be a master. Chong and his grandfather practiced a philosophy that informs the body & the spirit. For them, this is a living notation: a common thread connecting cultures and family. It is this confluence of hybridity, the Asian and the African that underscores the confidence that Chong exudes.
Legend has it that when asked about the source of his music, John Coltrane replied that it (the music) flows- "not from me; but through me..." This is the natural mystic. A creative/composite sentience birthing itself again and again.
............................................. I have been blessed with the guidance of many hands. Elder brothers and sisters that continue to mark my path. Ulysses Jenkins and Mathew Thomas taught me about Self Divination: the will and inward focus required to recognize one's own beauty. The griots, Amiri Baraka, Kamau Daa'ood, and Quincy Troupe sing of this to the heavens and the street. Albert Chong is a visual poet. Against an ever present backdrop of Euro-derived notions of beauty, he portrays the torso of a black woman-her belly stretched and full with child. And he calls her Venus From Trinidad Living In The Bronx. I find there in her image, the beauty, strength, vulnerability, and love of the woman who squeezed me out & into this world... then raised me up. -or- He sets a place on a burlap covered surface with a torn picture of three small brown girls with Chinese and African blood coursing through their veins. A tarnished fork and knife with cracked bone handles sit to the right. The sisters are framed by dried roses, speckled feathers, and cowries. The clean inverted skull of some small animal watches over them... they are food for his spiritual nourishment. Guardians.
Across the difference of the Latin, Franc, Anglo, and Germanic encoded depictions of divinity and the celestial courts, the angel is a recurring image-sprouting feathered wings. From the apse mosaic of San Vitale, to the beauty of so many Annunciations, to the Shepherds of the Gospel Book of Otto III: from Giotto's Lamentation, to Durer's angelic vision within The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, these beings are the visual and stylistic articulations of very specific cultural perceptions of virtue, judgment, power, and (one hopes) love. Conversely, the depicted consequences of a life misused were reserved for demons with bat-like appendages: creatures of the night reigning terror... Chong' response is to portray his own psychic worlds. He retrieves the mystery from beneath the fear and reveals the beauty there: A Pigeon and Three Silver Balls. Death is reclaimed as a gateway on a cyclical path: a marker/membrane existing within the flow of life force moving through generations. He gives honor to the flip side, and embraces the whole.
So now Chong offers up Winged Evocations. The Thrones have taken on human form, and the "shadow-ghost-man" returns to a more concrete physical realm. These figures are draped in suits dressed with power: bat wings softly fanning the room. And the image takes me up and out into the internal spaces of my own mind.
Several years ago, I was standing on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, giving thanks. It was late afternoon. A warm on shore breeze moved against the face of the rock and rose as a thermal. At this time each day I would walk over to sit with the sun, just as the hang gliders stepped out into nothing... acting upon a profound trust. My earliest memory of dreaming is of flight. And the images repeat here, and there, years after the dream started: sharp, but with rounded edges now...
Just dip your shoulder and roll through it/lay down and be held by what you
cannot see. Icarus/falcon soars son to sun scorching his face. Choices made.
Across a distance, I hear my own voice: a hoarse, intimate whisper...
"Daddy, I want to fliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii..."
May the circle be unbroken. Ashe'...
Essay by Johnny Coleman.
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