it’s not My Music is its own echo. In here, witnessing becomes a form of authorship. Drawing from their vintage photo archive, Mosie Romney looks, corrodes, grows, and imprints found memories into new worlds. Their canvases are woven with magic—forms, figures, and ideas disappear and reappear within them. Subjectivity and the act of seeing and hearing become a metabolizing process that destabilizes the known, fixed states of mine/yours/ours/theirs. This is a Black collective production. This is call and response, this is the sample, the beat, the loop, the meme. It’s not my music, it’s ours!
The exhibition, Romney’s second solo with Nicodim, emerges underneath the nighttime magic of Hecate. Impossible spaces assert their dominion within and beyond the gallery walls— time and identity are compressed, distorted, opaqued, vaulted, organic, exhibitional—they produce their own fantasy acoustics. Sound and possibility are in abundance here. Bodies old and used morph into new, taking spirit-form. They explode through logic and time, caught mid-transit journeying through and opening portals. The music cracks, breaks, deconstructs, destroys in tradition and reverbs towards freedom.
What is the sound of a color? A lo-o-o-o-ok? How do you say “???” in real life?
Romney’s process breaks the boundaries of the archive, memory, truth, reality and fantasy. The audience becomes the player, the player becomes the director, the director becomes the subject, the subject becomes the scene. Characters vibrate on the brink, and break past their realms. People, creatures, spaces fall out of the works to look and see. They digest, frame, piss, fart, and sing out the worlds around them. Through mirrors, reflection, and refraction, we watch them experience and remember themselves. They, too, are authoring and we, once the audience, are allowing ourselves to be seen and made material. We are all transforming each other and leaving empty spaces behind.
— Ley, May 2022
Mosie Romney (b. 1994, New York) lives and works in Ridgewood, Queens, New York. A Jamaican-American artist, they received their education from SUNY Purchase, obtaining a Bachelor of Science in Visual Arts in 2016. They have been an artist in residence at the Home School, Hudson in 2018 and at Pocoapoco, Oaxaca City in 2021, and are included in the collections of the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Pond Society, Shanghai; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai. Recent exhibitions include Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, curated by Mosie Romney, Nicodim New York (2022); Mosie Romney: Old, Used & New, Gern en Regalia, New York (2022, solo); Different Strokes, curated by Marcus Jahmal, Almine Rech, London (2021); Friend Zone, curated by Vaughn Spann, Half Gallery, New York (2021); Mosie Romney: ENERGYnever, Nicodim Upstairs, Los Angeles (2021, solo); Salon de Peinture, Almine Rech, New York (2021); Touch, Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York (2021); Evening Lark, Y2K Group, New York (2020, solo); PAPA RAGAZZE!, a cura di Olivia Neutron Bomb, Nicodim Los Angeles (2020); and Mosie Romney and Juan Guiterrez, Meredith Rosen Gallery, New York (2020).