Domestic Demo a five part exhibition by Muzae Sesay
Muzae Sesay - Currently Untitled
Oil and oil pastel on canvas. 48 x 72 inches. 2025.
Domestic Demo
A five-part exhibition curated by
Muzae Sesay
Featuring:
Alicia Hougey
Arrington West
Ashley Wentling
Billie Ocean
Chaz Bear
Cheflee
Ezra Teshome
Yoni Asega
Opening November 8, 2025, 6–9PM
pt.2
1523b Webster St.
Oakland, CA
pt.2 Gallery presents Domestic Demo, a five-part exhibition curated by Muzae Sesay that unfolds across all rooms of the gallery. The project brings together two solo presentations of new paintings by Sesay with collaborative exhibitions from artists and friends who have shaped his creative and personal life.
The title Domestic Demo plays on the dual meanings of the word, part demonstration, part demolition, a gesture of both revealing and releasing, of making visible and letting go. Through painting, video, and sound, the exhibitions move between reflection, memory, and transformation. Sesay describes the project as a kind of death, memorializing moments in his life and practice through painting. It revisits the spirit of his first solo exhibition at pt.2, Domestic Dive (2018), which marked the beginning of his exploration into interior worlds and emotional architecture. Seven years later, Domestic Demo looks back on that foundation as a closing chapter that clears space for what comes next.
Muzae Sesay - The First Turn To Face Each Other
Acrylic, vinyl emulsion, and colored pencil on canvas . 14 x 14 inches. 2025.
“I often think of painting as a prolonged and perpetual goodbye — the act of imprinting a synthesized world and grounding a fleeting moment, preserving its mundane relevance while archiving it as a marker of a single life lived. It becomes a timestamp demonstrating both the consciousness and the naïveté of a present response to living. Most of the works are interior vignettes representing our interior romances. All of the works are made with honor and respect for the death of an experience and its solidification.”
- Muzae Sesay (regarding “An Outside Fire Inside” and “Thirteen Hour Sunset”)
Across the gallery, each room becomes a vignette within a larger narrative.
Room 1: Domestic Demo Group Show
Alicia Hougey, Arrington West, Ashley Wentling, Chaz Bear, Ezra Teshome, Yoni Asega
A gathering of creatives from Sesay’s extended circle, most of whom do not primarily identify as painters. The show celebrates artmaking as play, joy, and connection, an open invitation to create for creation’s sake. “The most human thing to do is to create art and I’m deeply motivated by the people I love who create for purely human reasons,” Sesay says, a sentiment that anchors this room as both tribute and offering to the people who have inspired his own practice.
Alicia Hougey - Bearing Degrees Minutes
Acrylic on canvas. Size. 2025.
Room 2: An Outside Fire Inside
Muzae Sesay
In this room, Sesay’s paintings take on a darker, more introspective tone, exploring mourning, longing, and the tension between destruction and renewal. A large work depicts the interior of a house in the Palisades that was burning down while he was painting it, allowing a real time response as fires swept through Southern California. The act of painting became a way to witness destruction and translate it into form.
Room 3: PROTONEMA
Billie0cean
A meditation on shedding, growing, and release, PROTONEMA offers a spiritual and emotional cleanse. Through sound, image, and texture, Billie0cean explores love, desire, and the residual codes of history, reprogramming them into new possibilities for the future. Known for her surreal, bubblegum-Afrofuturist approach that blends fantasy, horror, and ASMR-like intimacy, Billie0cean’s work blurs the line between the conscious and the subconscious, offering a full-sensory experience of renewal and awakening.
Billie Ocean - PROTONEMA film still
Room 4: Thirteen Hour Sunset
Muzae Sesay
Here, the paintings move towards warmth and openness. Sesay’s larger works and smaller intimate vignettes trace memory, love, and the quiet beauty of transition. The paintings look closely at personal relationships, finding in them reflections of larger existential and social questions, the macro seen through the micro. Each forms its own small world of domestic intimacy, care, and longing. “It’s this divine fire,” Sesay says, “always wanting something more from this rectangle.”
Demo Room: An Unclean Wash
Cheflee and Muzae Sesay
An experiment in collaboration and process, a space for improvisation and play between Sesay and musician Cheflee.
Together, these rooms form a house of memory and movement. Domestic Demo gathers what has been built, loved, and lost, holding it up to the light one last time before letting it go. It is both a reflection and a reminder to stay curious, to honor community, and to keep searching for something new within familiar walls.