Dominic Musa - The Trouble's Not in the Mirror

About

This body of work capitalizes on visual and verbal double entendre, using the recurring icon of the mask as both shelter from and means to self-reflection. The construction of each painting performs this act of introspection; paint layered and obscured, wiped and poured, ambiguous and precisely rendered. Some figures navigate this sprawling interior world with an unsteadiness that highlights the disarming nature of such inquiry, while others triumph in its generative potential. The resulting images lay bare the anxiety of meditation, the possibility in making and the continual project of self-actualization.

Dominic Musa weaves together a diverse archive of source images, ranging from film stills to direct observation, 19th century photography to invention. In Past Leads the Blind, Musa distills and transforms a scene from the 1973 film, “The Exorcist”. The figure is mirrored and the interior barren, rendered in a synesthetic monochrome of reds and crimsons. With only a spectral spark arising from their point of connection, the tenuous potential of self-reflection is laid bare. This scene is repurposed in The Shadows of Artifacts, with the figures removed and only the objects of examination remaining. Vessels and busts are scattered across the work table, relics of the past that offer and obstruct.

The paintings act as a vehicle to navigate the past and present. Fleeting scenes intermix organically, they are observed, recollected, and reconfigured. Questions of desire and need, guilt and honor, greed and obligation are answered in moments of pause. Each painting is a mirror, each painting is a window. Slow and deliberate, The Trouble’s Not in the Mirror explores the duality of introspection.

Dominic Musa lives and work in Paterson, NJ. He received a MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA from School of Visual Arts in New York. Past solo exhibitions include Itch for Solitude, Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montreal; Outside and Around, Y2K Group, New York; Unsettled Waters, Taymour Grahne Projects, London; Task-Negative, Galerie Nicolas Robert, Toronto; Apple In The Dark, Harkawik, New York; Resonance, Y2K Group, New York; Anywhere Out Of The World, Helena Anrather, New York; Highway Blues, curated by JJ Manford, Underdonk, Brooklyn. Awards and residencies include Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.