Press Release - "Freetown Veranda" by Muzae Sesay
Muzae Sesay
”Our Stop On The Ladder With The Best View”
Oil Pastel and wax pencil on canvas
65.5 x 72 Inches
2020
pt. 2:
Freetown Veranda
Muzae Sesay
Opening - August 15, 2020
Showing Through: Friday, September 4, 2020
Schedule a private viewing
info@part2gallery.com
Identity and self as a malleable tool of cultural perception. Identity and self as hegemonic force.
In many ways, Sierra Leone was taken from me. Conflicting narratives aim to define my identity, my social perception, my self-esteem, and my pride; and thus, an investigation ensues. With proud immigrant father, who looked for anyway to convey his triumph over adversity and generational upward mobility, an assimilationist tone filled the space of history with a sense of gratitude for individual sacrifice and a prosperous future within the great nation. This tone since seems to ring out, echo, and reverberate, touching every inch of this occupied land. Toxic exceptionalism in the American atmosphere smothers the space of comparative cultures. Demonizes and generalized by western media, Sierra Leone has become synonymous with civil war, famine, government corruption, epidemics, blood diamonds, or whatever points to a less-than narrative. Paired with a sense of youthful rebellion, the rich cultural traditions and my participation growing-up in the Sierra Leonean community of Southern California became a not particularly significant chore. It wasn’t until leaving, seeing others in desperate search of things I took for granted, that I realized the importance of a renegotiation.
The African-American, the American-African, both all of it and also somewhere in-between.
In a homecoming of the mind of sorts, the image of looking out onto the veranda at the city of Freetown, Sierra Leone has been slowly walking towards the forefront of my conciseness since I first left the unsettled nest of my upbringing. In true fantaradical fashion, images are developed by remembering how it felt to be somewhere I have yet experienced and exists only in mind. Paintings depict Freetown, not as perceived truths passed to me, but as if I was born there, the things I would do there, the imagery I might see there, and the fun I would there. Centered around joy, recreation, and everyday life, a counter narrative emerges where I retain the active agency of imagination.
I am drinking palm wine, joking with friends, watching fishing boats dock for the day at Lumley Beach. I am setting up a pitch out back and dreaming of one day making the national team. I am haggling at open-air markets that line the street. I am explaining that buying a motorcycle is to find new work when really it is to liberate myself and find freedom. I am looking out onto the city thinking of how to leave my mark. I am flourishing, rolling around the grassy fields of my mind.
Grounded by the physical barriers of the actual turmoil pointed to by American supremacy, Sierra Leone has yet to manifest in my reality. Space to connect first-hand has not been kind over the years and Freetown remains ever so slightly on the horizon.
To find Salone as hunter/gatherer, untraditional tools and methods seem to spot moments of potential truths. Research within an abstract amount of time becomes a comment on how we may use a modern information landscape to uncover shared cultural connections. The process of collecting images through Youtube screenshots of tourist travel footage, nightclub reviews, street interview news reports, online independent comedy shows, and vlogs of young Sierra Leoneans walking through daily life in Freetown, provides reference imagery of a true Salone while building the framework to dismantle the hegemonic ethnocentrism.
Muzae Sesay, 2020.
I am explaining that buying a motorcycle is to find new work when really it is to liberate myself and find freedom. I am looking out onto the city thinking of how to leave my mark. I am flourishing, rolling around the grassy fields of my mind. - Muzae Sesay, 2020
Pt. 2 Gallery is pleased to present Freetown Veranda, a solo exhibition of paintings and drawings by Oakland based artist Muzae Sesay. In this new body of work, Sesay explores his Sierra Leonean heritage, a homeland the artist has yet to visit in person. As a child, Sesay was raised with the necessity to balance his cultural heritage with assimilation into American society. Aided now by research and the act of painting as a tool for self-understanding, the paintings in Freetown Veranda reaffirm Sesay’s understanding of his cultural identity.
The tale of Sierra Leone told through a hegemonic westernized lens is one of civil war, blood diamonds, epidemics, and famine. Freetown Veranda disputes that perspective and reveals Sesay’s coming to terms with his perspective of a homeland shaped by tales told by proud immigrant parents, coupled with the dreams of an eager dreamer.
James Baldwin wrote that 'Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.'
With such an understanding of home, Sesay’s connection to his ancestry is evident as an innate understanding, not just of a physical place, but of a lifestyle and wealth of traditions. Sesay reflected that: “In true fantaradical fashion, images are developed by remembering how it felt to be somewhere I have yet to experience and exists only in mind.” Rendered in vibrant oil pastels of red, magenta, orange and green, this association of home allows Sesay’s perspective to be one of optimism - a place is not defined by its conflicts or tragedies, rather the people that weather those difficulties and treasure life, love, music, family and, art nonetheless.
The composition of Sesay’s paintings reveals a geographic reality unlike our own. Familiar shapes contort into maze-like scenes that encourage a variety of perspectives. Staircases, windowpanes, and opposing walls create a complex geometry reminiscent of the myriad pathways imagination can take. Like the artist, many viewers of Sesay’s work won’t have visited Sierra Leone. The paintings of Freetown Veranda, hovering in a fantaradical plane in the threshold between reality and imagination opens up a new perspective, one shaped by cultural traditions and ancestry rather than hegemonic ethnocentricity.
Muzae Sesay
”Kin Feebah Motobike Ridah”
Vinyl paint, oil pastel, wax pastel, and colored pencil on canvas
60 x 48 Inches
2020
Muzae Sesay
b.1989, Long Beach, California. Based in Oakland, California.
(he/him)
Muzae’s professional career and artistic focus derives from a lifelong commitment to understanding our collective relationship to space, memory, community, and the perceived truths within them. From that foundation, his artistic practice has thematically revolved around the merging of these relationships to form paintings that provoke social reasoning and induce the viewer’s agency in the navigation and narration of imagery. Current work connects with the feelings that arise from testing the absoluteness of the strict and rigid aspects of physics and realism found in architecture, design, and our built environment. Utilizing skewed perspectives of space and shape collapsed into flat two-dimensional planes, Muzae creates surreal geometric interiors, exteriors, landscapes, and structures; presenting a situation in which to be experienced and explored. Inspired by ideas of cultural reflection and developed by questioning the validity of remembrance, his work often depicts worlds created in response to a social introspection and a continual challenge of perceived reality. This process involves taking imagery from the physical world and reducing them to rudimental forms that then populate fragmented universes compiled by perspectival fallacies and tied together by harmonious color composition. The viewer is compelled to understand the space, question its dimensionality, dive inside and walk around.