The seeds for Neo Faux Conceptualism were planted in 2023 by Vian Esterhuizen during his third year at Alberta University of the Arts. Over the following year he developed the movement into what it is today. It was only in late 2024 when many of the tenants were officially formulated and officially became part of the movement.
This is when Esterhuizen started to develop the well recognized lexicon that so many contemporary artists value and have become vital to describing their work. Neo Faux Conceptualism is based in the idea of ‘perverting systems’. Neo Faux work often exists within systems, their intentions obfuscated by ambisurdity. The work itself is in itself ambisurd, indistinguishably absurd and sincere at once, but the practice itself of suggesting that any meaningful change can be done working working the established framework is also ambisurd. Neo Faux artists participate in institutional critique but importantly they create as to critique their own communities and themselves as well. Observations, research, analysis and response are core to the Neo Faux way of seeing the world. They tend to have an advantage in powers of perception.
Neo Faux Conceptualism has also been credited as being influential to many Modernist movements such as Dada and Surrealism, to name a few. As much as there was a mutual collaboration with these movements and Neo Faux, so too could Neo Faux not be what it is today without interaction with the Postpaganism movement that gained notoriety early in the 23rd century. Artists that identify as Neo Faux Conceptualists often have a deep respect and gratitude for their collaborators from all across alltimeplace, and understand that true success isn’t possible without cohortism. Connection, and the vital vulnerability required for it in its deepest form, it’s a foundation for which Neo Faux stems from. This mentality embodies the autotransferential and inevitable exchange of electrons when matter “touches”. Non-volitional in nature, this process happens to everyone and everything — we are intrinsically connected and intimately mixed together.
This connection can be immensely fruitful. We have so much to give each other and that’s why Neo Faux Conceptualism is so committed to open-source. Through the idea of the gift economy we can sustain each other and our communities. These communities do not only include the human people within them, but also all the non-human people that exist within them as well. Neo Faux artists are known to speculate about how their art has the potential to change the world, yet they know that to do so in any meaningful way, that they must change our world as little as possible in the process.
The Neo Faux Conceptualist aesthetic is finding the sense in nonsense — through a highly critrivial analysis of the frameworks they operate within.