Press Release - "The Purest Air I've Ever Known" by Muzae Sesay
Muzae Sesay
”Resilience I”
Oil pastel, vinyl paint, wax pastel on canvas
71 x 71 Inches
2020
pt. 2:
The Purest Air I’ve Ever Known
Muzae Sesay
Opening - August 15, 2020
Showing Through: Friday, September 4, 2020
Schedule a private viewing
info@part2gallery.com
If there were a key growing out of the top of my head and its lock counterpart was the ground beneath me, the purest air I’ve ever known is in the moments building up to the mechanism engaging.
The air that Earth provides us in times of turbulence - I compare it to the feeling of taking those first few breathes when entering nature from a life in the city. It hits different. Providing context to the toxin we grew up inhaling. An illumination occurs where we can see more clearly the ill’s that have remained vailed within its ingrained matter-of-factness. New potential futures emerge. The purest air is a cooling sensation. Similar to the feeling of relaxing your eyebrow ridge or the moments right before a psychedelic experience where it feels as though your brain takes a sip of chilled water. A sinking feeling. A grounding feeling. As if our feet were attempting to connect to Earths ethernet cable. The purest air coincides with a moment of realization, a moment of rediscovery, a moment of renegotiation, and a slowing of time. The purest air allows us to connect to the most micro to compare to our most macro. The purest air provides the purest thought.
“The wind of change blows straight into the face of time” - “Wind of Change”, Scorpions. 1991
Within this air, I can see a new innate quality of resilience. The endurance of nature echoes the inevitable progress and motion of the universe. Considering the oneness with nature, I now think to reflect this back onto the body.
The tree, or what’s left of it, appeared.1
Continually maimed downwards from living in urban servitude, they are controlled and sculpted, almost, and often to death. Rings of life and experience exposed in a stoic demise for only ever having agency over the vibrancy of their own leaves. Framed by iron, cement, brick, or whatever structure of the manufactured world, there is an impenetrable barrier. The lot where they grow is always and forever contained under the watchful mark of orange streetlight glow. However, with resilience far too long and roots far too deep, there will always be new growth. Indications of vitality through depictions of sprouting leaves trickle into the composition, persevering and emerging from hostility.
While inside our homes, they cut the heads off our trees in the darkness of distraction. Yet, the air we breathe feels different now. The floor and ceiling we built is gone now, and I’m curious to see what world we step into.
Muzae Sesay, 2020.
1 Early 2020, pre-quarantine, I became struck by the discovery of all the decapitated public trees in the neighborhood surrounding my downtown Oakland studio. They were these hideous monuments of death lining the sidewalks. Some had iron park fence-like planters so they had to be chopped at around person hight. I was shocked to think about how many times I’ve seen these large stumps on my day-to-day happenings without real acknowledgment or consideration. I suppose it registered as normal and then that changed. I saw them for the first time and now they haunt the streets.
If there were a key growing out of the top of my head and its lock counterpart was the ground beneath me, the purest air I’ve ever known is in the moments building up to the mechanism Engaging.
- Muzae Sesay, 2020
Pt. 2 Gallery is pleased to present The Purest Air I’ve Ever Known, a solo exhibition of paintings and drawings by Oakland based artist Muzae Sesay. The exhibition continues Sesay’s sociological impression of a rapidly changing Oakland, a transition marked by stunted growth and unnatural decay.
The concentric rings of a tree tell a tragic tale, a story that cannot be told until the close. The search for knowledge and understanding is so driven by thirst that the very thing we seek to understand must be destroyed in order to achieve that goal. To gaze upon a tree stump and learn the test of time it has withstood is to recognize that tree stands no longer.
Before the ‘impenetrable barrier of the manufactured world’ dug its roots of iron and concrete into the soil, the Ohlone tribes of the Chochenyo and the Karkin harkened a deep connection to the land. So too has Sesay, wandering the streets of his Oakland home, the spiritual connection between the terra firma and the creative soul of the artist who steps foot daily out his door is broadened into an understanding of the lasting power of the earth we inhabit. Sesay ponders that: “As if our feet were attempting to connect to Earth’s ethernet cable. The purest air coincides with a moment of realization, a moment of rediscovery, a moment of renegotiation, and a slowing of time.”
Thus the tree stump enters Sesay’s visual lexicon, a dazzling array of pervasive colors and recurring motifs in kaleidoscopic space. The worlds that Sesay paints invite the viewer to enter without restriction or preordained assumption. They exist in counterpoint to metropolitan reality, favoring intangible, surreal arrangement instead of geometric and symmetrical sprawl. This lapse of accepted “structure” allows the viewer to consider life beyond the scope of domesticity and daily order.
The purest air, the most steadfast vibe exists in our connection to nature. While walls and ceilings, the endless grids of suburbs and metropolises alike come and go, “The endurance of nature echoes the inevitable progress and motion of the universe.” It is in this space, where the lock and key meet, exemplifying the existence or truth and purity.
The purest air pays homage to the land, and trees, the chaos, and the irregularities demolished in favor of a cleaner future of order and conformity. A series of new paintings in oil, acrylic, and pastel, as well as a set of drawings, commentate the “ Rings of life and experience exposed in a stoic demise for only ever having agency over the vibrancy of their leaves.”
Muzae Sesay
”New Forest VI”
Aerosol, pastel, graphite, wax pencil on paper
20.25 x 25.25 inches
Framed
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.