Muzae Sesay premieres his solo exhibition, Domestic Dive, at Pt. 2 Gallery this coming weekend. The exhibition will serve as both introduction and retrospective for one of the Bay Area's most exciting young artists, and one who has already grown, changed, and built upon his unique style, even in the last few months. This will also be the inaugural show for Part 2. Gallery, founded by Brock Brake and Dan Pan, the former being the curator and co-founder of the now-defunct Athen B Gallery, the latter being the founder of First Amendment Gallery. For Bay Area art enthusiasts, this is a landmark exhibition, pairing an Oakland based artist and gallery together, underscoring the unbridled potential of a new generation that will continue to make the San Francisco Bay Area a destination, and origin, of fresh, accessible, and beautiful art.
Be sure to check out our interview with Sesay from October 2017. He was also recently featured in an interview alongside San Francisco-based visual artist Rewina Beshue, who was featured on our site back in January.
"Domestic Dive frames the recollection of home and community as a central concept from which to analyze the fragmentation and validity of beliefs and memory. When attempting to understand ideology in context to oneself, the home acts as a pivotal location to investigate the origins of thought. Memories become the foundation for contextualizing emotion, morality, and social consciousness; however, the dogmas created tend to be strict and ridged while based upon perceived facts, biases, and subject to a multitude of influences. Beliefs that stem from our recollections and memories are then perceived and accepted as fundamental truths. The impact of holding thoughts as truths impervious to critique are humans existing in an infinite amount of realities simultaneously with selective consensus. Domestic Dive identifies the fallacies we hold true while recalling our most intimate spaces.
In this body of work, parallels are drawn to the formation of ideology through questioning 'truths' within memory. Certain works depict the struggle of trying to accurately remember a space from the past; small aspects or vignettes shift and blend together without a clear picture of the space as a whole. Others play with manipulating memory through a process of implanting a fake consciousness of a fake space; remembering how it felt to be somewhere that physically exists nowhere. Both approaches demonstrate a critical lens on memory; how fluid and individualistic we can be and yet how it completely shapes the world we collectively live in.
Like the variations of how and what we choose to internalize, each guest visiting these paintings is encouraged to take on a unique perspective on how to interpret the composition. Opposed to an acute recollection of facts; focusing on atmosphere, color and rhythm reflects how we feel about specific memories. In painting as in thought, the emotional takeaway ends up surpassing the clarity of direct representation. Thus, the guest is compelled to understand the space, question it's dimensionality, dive inside and walk around.––Muzae Sesay"
