Exhibition Review: Mixed Media | Brian Rope
All my memories are
mistranslations | Omar Musa
Humble House Gallery,
Canberra | 4 May – 2 June 2024
Does this artist need introduction? He is a Bornean-Australian author, visual artist, poet and woodcutter from Queanbeyan, Australia - well-known to many as a rapper. In recent times he has been creating music and visual art in the two very different places he lives between - Malaysian Borneo and Brooklyn, New York City.
Omar Musa has recently been in Australia talking about his latest album which touches on environment, culture, religious identity, and mortality. And to bring us this solo exhibition All my memories are mistranslations - comprising Cyanotypes, Linocuts and Woodcuts on a variety of materials, plus a Cast Glass sculpture. The largest cyanotypes are 70cm x 95cm.
The diverse works tell us much provided we explore them closely and think about the messages Musa is seeking to share. As with the album mentioned above, the artworks look at cultural and environmental matters. And much more. The show’s title reveals a starting point for our explorations – it’s about the artist’s misinterpreted memories. His artist statement says he has found out, years later, that he misheard stories his grandparents told him, that “crucial things were lost in translation.”
The artist goes on to tell us that in this exhibition he wanted “to lean into dissonance, these spaces lacking coherence; find comfort in contradiction.” So, he sought to make a playful, unsettling world inhabited by ghosts.
Musa’s poetry piece with the same title as this show makes other references to ghosts, including one posing the question Am I so different from a hoax ghost photographer of a past age? One artwork, titled Tumbled Dry Brooklyn Ghost Boy, includes Bornean boys sailing across a coin-operated washing machine in Brooklyn.
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| Tumbled Dry Brooklyn Ghost Boy – Cyanotype, 58cm H x 46cm W © Omar Musa |
A huge Woodcut has an equally huge title – The river is a keris / a sacred dagger / cast from meteoric iron & scrapyard bike frame nickel / patterned skin a trillion times folded with rain & song / whetted on white hot sun. Additional words on the artwork read Battle Cry or Requiem? We Buried Our Eyes In a Storm. So much to see, to read, to consider.
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| The river is a keris / a sacred dagger / cast from meteoric iron & scrapyard bike frame nickel / patterned skin a trillion times folded with rain & song / whetted on white hot sun - Woodcut, ink on blackout cloth, 148.59cm H x 396cm W © Omar Musa |
Another smaller Woodcut has a very simple title but again has much to examine, clearly telling us that our memories are not always correct; indeed far more likely to distort over time. Perhaps, like eels, our memories can swim backwards by reversing the direction of the wave?
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| Bubu – Woodcut, ink on paper, 61cm H x 122cm, 2022 (reprint) © Omar Musa |
A simple drawing conveys a familiar message about the way some folk converse with friends in their dreams. The resultant Linocut’s title adds further information.
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| He Said, “You Need to Relax, Bro” – Linocut, ink on paper 36.5cm H x 34.5cm W © Omar Musa |
It is unsurprising that in many artworks, this poet/rapper again uses words. In his Smoke Over Sulu cyanotype there are words which, I believe, relate to Islamic prayer, a Malayic oral poetry form and how speakers of different native languages use a common language to converse. The background scene shows smoke rising. Is it environmental smoke? Was it caused by a terrorist attack? Something else?
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| Smoke Over Sulu 2 – Cyanotype 58cm H x 46cm W © Omar Musa |
Another
Cyanotype, Too Hard to Say, has no words on it but, nevertheless, speaks
most eloquently.
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| Too Hard To Say – Cyanotype, 58cm H x 46cm W © Omar Musa |