Artwork: Subway River 2023
Artist: Omar Musa
Medium: woodcut
Edition: 3/5
Dimensions: 102.5 x 159.5cm
Acquisition: An acquisition of the ACT Legislative Assembly Art Advisory Committee, 2024
Asset no: OLA002847
About the Work
Subway River is based on the artist’s realisation that many of the conversations he’d had with his grandparents, which became part of his personal narrative, were in fact misheard or misunderstood. He writes: ‘I wanted to lean into dissonance and spaces lacking coherence; find comfort in contradiction. I made an unlikely mash-up of the two very different places I live between — Malaysian Borneo and Brooklyn, New York City — to make a playful, unsettling world inhabited by ghosts. Here, there is a clash of rose-tinted romanticism against latter day capitalism and ecological collapse; the discarded and the sacred, grief and rejuvenation, the joy and pain of homecoming.’
About the Artist
Omar Musa is a Bornean-Australian author, visual artist and poet from Queanbeyan, now based in New York. He has released four poetry books (including Killernova 2021), four hip-hop records, and received a standing ovation at TEDx Sydney at the Sydney Opera House.
His debut novel Here Come the Dogs was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award and Miles Franklin Award and he was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Young Novelists of the Year in 2015. His one-man play, Since Ali Died, won Best Cabaret Show at the Sydney Theatre Awards in 2018.