Muzae Sesay
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 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 dimensoinality, dive inside and walk around.
Q&A between Brett Amory and Muzae Sesay
BA: Fragmentation, memory, and home/domestic life are all common motifs evident in your work. Scenes drift in and out of ambiguous and imagined worlds where cryptic imagery calls to mind everydayness. Your work seems to hover in that space between perception and memory. Can you talk about what fuels your work?
MS: The fuel of my work is the same as the fuel of my body; air, water, food, people, etc. Maybe cliché but everything, of this world and not, fuels my work. I can only produce so much physical work however my understanding is that all of life, it’s order, it’s chaos are all artistic in nature. I think of art as a perspective layer between the senses and the brain. It’s either on or off and I like to keep mine on. It almost feels like a flame indifferent of fuel in that sense.
But to actually answer your question, what enters the physical work that I make are the images, ideas, conversations, relationships, emotions, and everyday life objects that I obsess over until they all force a way out. To talk about these types of things, I love creating space for them to naturally be discovered. By putting the viewer into a scene while encouraging their individual agency to navigate, their perception and memory become the focus. I believe the way guests move arond the space speaks to their personhood and the home is the most intimate of sites for that type of introspection. I consider myself to be the guide of the meditation in those moments. I try to give enough information to allow people to dive inside, discover their path, and take a seat.
BA: I really enjoy how your work reflects on specific places and experiences. Over time, memories become more and more abstracted, embellished or completely fail us. Are your paintings more of a manifold cast of past and present experiences?
MS: I’d say they reflect the emotional response to a single memory, multiple memories, fantasies, theories, crumbling truths, falsehoods, misconceptions all kinds of memory depending on the idea I’m setting people into. Representations can make claims allowing a point of entry where abstractions are the places where the viewer exposes their humanity.
BA: Familiar elements of domestic spaces connect us to the physical world. Your work also explores the relationship between the home and the self. With the Corona virus outbreak changing the way everyone in the world is working and living, being at home has become the new norm. Has your work changed since the outbreak?
MS: Oh it’s definitely changed in more ways than I even know right now. The home as domestic space is still centered in my heart but the idea of home is endless and I have no limits on what I can create about. My work is constantly changing however the events that have transpired in 2020 have opened an infinite conversation that moves in all directions. I could make work regarding heightened relationships with the domestic space, I could make work regarding our home on Planet Earth, I could make work about how we find home in community, I could make work that relates to the ideological home people barricade themselves in. There is so much to talk about in deeper ways then speaking.
BA: You were recently invited to participate in Bay Area Walls at SFMOMA, a series of commissions by local artists that consider the COVID-19 pandemic and unfolding crises of 2020. Can you talk about the exhibition and the work you made?
MS: The work I made was very specific to how I felt in the moment; ideas of identity, justice, pain, anger, resilience, and the museum itself, my relationship with them, their immense shortcomings and my hopefulness. It’s a lot to talk about here and it makes me quite sad. I speak on it more indepth in the exhibition writing.