“When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?” – Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

Conry has long been fascinated with the degradation/decay of urban areas, and an ongoing obsession with space/spaces, both real and imagined. Advancing these ideas this year has led to an investigation into virtual spaces, which can be viewed as a potential solution to current problems facing humanity, namely mass extinction and the demise of the planet, due to a combination of human-accelerated climate change and the ushering in of a new geological era, the Anthropocene.  The artist must respond to the societal norms and demands of the time: to ignore such progressions would be inauthentic. Simultaneously, contemporary art could be described as atemporal: with the accessibility of all art epochs at the touch of a button, the swipe of a screen, all eras exist concurrently which allows artists to treat history as a sort of pick ‘n’ mix – they “know their history but don’t feel imprisoned by it”[1]

[1] Jason Farago, The Forever Now review:  calling time on the avant-garde, The Guardian, September, 2014