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Yasser Musa at 20
posted (July 16, 2009)

This morning, Lightburn shared the stage with Yasser Musa. He’s observing his twentieth year of being an artist. In those two decades he’s done it all, from the not so sublime to the ridiculous, creating expansive abstract canvasses in one era and dunking bratz dolls into condensed milk in the next. It has been a wild ride and he’s pulled up some highlights from a retrospective at his gallery space, the Image Factory.

Yasser Musa, Artist
“I know realize that instead of looking at the art that I’ve made, the biggest emotional idea that comes forward is the idea of collaboration, the many collaborations that I have had whether it was with Ivan Duran in 1992 or Jules in 1996 or Joan Duran starting well for many years but really in 2000 the Zero Exhibits and then the Landings Project and working with Miss Meg and Father Diekman and so many others; with Gilvano and Michael Gordon, and the whole Factory culture. I realize that this colloboroation spirit is what really guided my work and what really informed the work in terms of how it presented itself to the public.

The idea though is that you can’t just look back because how do you compress 20 years of your life in two rooms. It is impossible so we’ve had to edit out a lot of things but focus really on 45 key works involving paintings, drawings, collages, video, installations like the one behind me here. But also to do new things and so we are also going to present a set of recorded poems called Loose Electricity.

From 1992 with the minus 8 exhibit, I made a principle position or I declared a position that the consensus or the tradition of how Belize presented art or viewed art was really a very narrow consensus and so obviously that was proven even greater to me when all things like the internet and DVDs and Facebook and all of these things came out. These things in 1992 didn’t exist. It is just proves that technology moves so fast that the artist cannot be straitjacketed, cannot be limited to one medium.”

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