pt.2 Gallery is pleased to present “SKELETONS” a solo exhibition by represented artist Muzae Sesay opening Saturday, June 15th in Downtown Oakland. The exhibition will feature a new series of paintings by the Oakland based artist. pt.2 gallery is located at 1523 b Webster St. and is just blocks away from both 12th & 19th St Bart Stations. Opening receptions at pt.2: are always free and open to the public. To receive a preview of the exhibition please contact info@part2gallery.com. Muzae Sesay will also be on a panel talk about the exhibition at MoAD in San Francisco, June 16th 3-5pm with Basil Kincaid and MoAD curator Emily Kuhlmann.

Muzae Sesay statement on the work:

Skeletons

A big hotel yon ghost is fetish eating the sun from under the freeway overpass ...and oh what a life it was your world and ours yet still also when cities progress as a leaf grows to die ...and you?

Folklore from a moment as experienced in Oakland, California told in the present from future memories of the past, the work of “Skeletons” steps towards making sense of the complexity around socially systemic happenings that must be assessed in multiple dimensions to begin to approach the issues they bring forth.

A dim days end. The orange sunset of a black landscape. Colorful rhythmic pillars sway; pressured and yet determined to hold ground. Bones of the past lives lived. Bones that built the beauty that brought us. The home that housed a community now starves. Ripped exposed from a centric progression at their last moments before rehabilitation. Skeletons of the cultural vibrancy and historic diversity that gives Oakland its strength and vitality. Now a relic for the rich living in fear and power.

Grey elegance and the facade of class, both intrigued and envious; surround, smother, and suffocate. Drawn in by the radiance of culture yet blind to what culture really is. A mixture of an inability to empathize, sterile luxury, superficial solutions to safety, capitalization of land, commodification of identity, allocation of resources, and power creates a toxic storm.

One picks up trash to beautify one’s neighborhood beauty to value an L for homie to find nice coffee all edges cut

As a sword has two sides, Skeletons also take form from the towering bars of development that suck up visible light. A home is gutted while a condominium goes up. Visually, the two become one and morality cancels itself out. Like Skeletons crippled by dichotomy, our position is and/both yet we proclaim either/or. The tension of division veils the layers of oppression and the agency of each participant.

Just as night falls into day, there is always motion to the horizon; the idea of something more, something beautiful within grasp. It’s consciousness and community that lends itself to hope and strength. Together, cutting through the noise, a challenge to the depleting intergenerational treasures of our diversity is being made in response. In the dark, we grow the bones through the cracks of the cement. The push and pull of colonization.