Working
in a variety
of media
including
video,
painting,
textiles,
music, and
performance,
Brooklyn-based
artist Jayson
Musson returns
to
Fleisher/Ollman
for his first
solo
exhibition at
the gallery in
three years.
Musson will
present a new
series of
Coogi sweater
paintings,
exploring the
in-between
spaces of high
art versus
craft,
intentional
versus found
abstraction,
and, most
significantly,
the notion of
ownership of
African-American
popular
culture. These
works are not
paintings at
all, but
recycled Coogi
sweaters—wildly-colored
knit
garments—mounted
on stretchers
and
transformed
into pictures.
For Musson,
Coogi sweaters
are more about
African-American
nostalgia and
cultural
memory than
homage to
Notorious
B.I.G. or a
commercial
garment brand.
Coogi, long
regarded as a
status symbol
within the
African-American
Hip-Hop
community, has
always been a
white-owned
company, first
by Australians
and then by
Americans, and
functions as
yet another
instance of
the white
power
structure
profiting off
of the
perceived
desires of
people of
color.
According to
Musson:
This,
in effect,
operates as a
form of
colonization
over another
corner of
Black memory,
and any
reverence
these garments
received, at
least in my
opinion, is
highly
undeserved. I
come to the
Coogi material
as a junk
collector of
sorts. I
consider the
sweaters
‘cultural
detritus’—just
another
commodity on a
long list of
objects many
people are
manipulated
into coveting
or
consuming...ultimately,
this work is
about a form
of existential
disconnection,
that even as
one retreats
into memory in
order to
counteract the
trauma of the
present, even
these memories
are occupied
by our enemy.
Thus, the
alienation of
the self is
continued even
further.
Jayson
Musson has had
solo
exhibitions at
Salon 94, New
York;
Fleisher/Ollman,
Pennsylvania
Academy of the
Fine Arts,
Marginal
Utility, and
Space 1026,
all in
Philadelphia;
and Dazed
& Confused
Magazine
Gallery,
London. Musson
and Alex Da
Corte
collaborated
on an
exhibition at
the Institute
of
Contemporary
Art,
Philadelphia,
entitled
Easternsports,
in 2014.
Musson has
been featured
in numerous
group
exhibitions at
venues
including
Contemporary
Arts Museum,
Houston; Grey
Art Gallery,
NYU, New York;
Galerie
Perrotin,
Paris, France;
Postmasters,
New York;
Institute of
Contemporary
Art,
Philadelphia;
West Galeria,
Den Haag, The
Netherlands;
Grimmuseum,
Berlin,
Germany;
Fleisher/Ollman,
Philadelphia;
Hyde Park Art
Center,
Chicago; Yerba
Buena Center
for the Arts,
San Francisco;
and Cincinnati
Contemporary
Art Center,
Ohio, among
others. Musson
received his
BFA from the
University of
the Arts,
Philadelphia
in 2002 and
his MFA from
the University
of
Pennsylvania
in 2011. He
attended the
Skowhegan
School of
Painting and
Sculpture in
2011.
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