Read on Mousse

Oshay Green reluctantly introduces himself as an artist. He’s also a sound engineer and a welder. I first saw his work in 2024 at C L E A R I N G in Los Angeles, where sculptures and textile paintings looked like the dismantled shell of a recording studio. The exhibition title, IF YOU DON’T GET YO SORRY ASS UP, sounded like a command, or a joke, or a plea. Or maybe a dare: to disavow the music industry altogether and begin listening, finally, with new ears, lest we keep on being that square peg in a round hole. YM1 -34-35 (2024), a horizontal mass in which chunks of Styrofoam, dust covers, and batting are bound with elastic webbing, hung high on the wall, like insulation torn out mid-renovation, or refuse that fell from the rafters. Its protective function seemed moot. Nearby, in L7 (2024), a sheet of plywood leaning against the wall held the laser-etched logic of a RIFF file titled “Fuckin square.” There was no sound, only metadata, or what’s left behind once the music has left the room.

Green’s exhibition titles arrive as riddles—quips built on a familiarity with loss. Following IF YOU DON’T GET YO SORRY ASS UP came Lack at Ramiken, New York, in 2024; No chance. at Dvir Gallery, Paris, and L at Ramiken, both in 2025. A dialectical antagonism pulses beneath: How to show what capital never permits to appear? If Blackness is not of this world and its systems of visibility, then these titles function not as communicative signs but as symptoms of a structural condition. You took an L, you lost. Caught lacking, you died. No chance, but still commanded to rise. Such repetition with difference becomes less about care and more like pressure on a wound. The problem isn’t naming; it’s how the naming keeps the injury visible.

This visibility isn’t didactic. Green’s maneuver commingles consent, coercion, and pedagogy into an Afro-pessimist aesthetic. Curator and performance scholar Adrienne Edwards, writing on the possibility of an Afro-pessimist aesthetics, might agree, given that Green’s words ask for recognition (a form of consent) while operating within a grammar of social death—a structure where visibility doesn’t liberate, but rather conditions, permitting association, inviting judgment, enforcing proximity, and settling into the deceptive ease of familiarity.¹ You’re seen, but only on terms that make you manageable. 

The “invariably different sameness” that Edwards identifies manifests in Green’s titling. It registers a philosophical impasse—a search for an aesthetic language “adequate” to structural damnation.² Stuart Hall knew this, too: hegemonic structures are never fixed, always negotiated, even in the places that feel inevitable. Green’s titles live there, in that uneasy pendulum between coercion and consent. Each one—Lack, No chance., L—demands attention, perhaps agreement. Naming, then, becomes a form of address, admonishment, and articulation.

Oshay Green: L. Installation view, Ramiken, New York March 19 – April 19, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Ramiken. Photo: Dario Lasagni.

To make the works in L, Green torched decommissioned rifle barrels, forging them into spiked, splayed configurations—armored urchins at the scale of a human body. As if meditating on Edwards’s provocation, these sculptures, collectively titled Lacking phases (2024), don’t resist form so much as surrender to it, their spindly bodies making space, just so, for text to dominate. Green laid twelve of these gun-scrap sculptures across the gallery floor, some upright, others leaning, a few lying prone like felled bodies. He reinforced this valley-of-bones image in his exhibition text, quoting Isaiah 2:4—swords are beaten into plowshares, and war gets forgotten. There’s something prophetic in his method. Welds act like sutures of a sort, enfleshing the barrels and giving them an afterlife as art. This recalls welder-turned-artist David Smith, whose steel assemblies (I’m thinking of VB XVII, 1963) refused to separate fabrication from form. Over text message, Green tells me he works with “mostly MIG welding,” a technique not unlike what Smith practiced while fabricating military equipment at the American Locomotive Company during World War II.³ Like Smith, Green makes the labor of making visible: the seams, the joints, the scorch marks of a torch wielded with both precision and vulnerability

This visibility allows the sculptures to speak of their past lives. I know these Lacking phases aren’t bodies, but I still scan the barrels like a pathologist. Etchings appear: serial numbers, caliber designations, manufacturer marks. Stamped inscriptions—“LAZZERONI CAL .782 (308) WARBIRD,” “J.C. HIGGINS – MODEL 583.29 – SEARS, ROEBUCK AND CO.”—surface like whispers from the industrial unconscious.⁴ These aren’t subtext; they are the language of the work, scriptures of an American theology spoken in the dialect of the Second Amendment.

Detail shots of various Lacking phases, featuring insignia branded on the barrels.

Lacking phases 36 (2024) extends this language in kanji: 九九式. The characters mark the barrel as a Type 99 Arisaka, standard rifle of Imperial Japan in World War II. Above the kanji, a faint scar—likely the ghost of a chrysanthemum crest—has been scratched out to preserve the emperor’s honor after surrender. This barrel didn’t choose to be here among American relics, but here it is, folded into the afterlife of another empire’s ambitions

These inscriptions eclipse the sculptures themselves. Recall Edwards’s position: Afro-pessimist aesthetics do not rely on figuration, but rather displace it with text. Language stands in for forms that can no longer hold. Severed from their receivers, the barrels lose their center. Things fall apart, only to be welded back together again. But whatever innocence art claims drowns in the engravings left behind. The gun is a textual object, dwelling in the syntax of manufacturing, the grammar of war, the liturgy of conquest. I keep imagining the Japanese soldier, anonymous to history, who once held that sliver of Lacking phases 36. In that imagistic realm, Green’s grammar clarifies the stakes. Echoing Edwards, his work reminds us that fluency with lingo—or the legibility of kanji—doesn’t equal solidarity, doesn’t constitute knowing. Instead, the sculptures ask how we arrange ourselves in the world, and who we place our faith in when every surface is compromised.

For No chance., Green made a combine titled God (2025) that serves as an apt coda. It’s a mattress—hoisted on discarded wood, coated in tar, torn open at the center. The makeshift bier recalls Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955), Fred Hampton’s promise and persecution, and the 1918 tarring of Black people—professionals, working poor—in Vicksburg, Mississippi. God isn’t figuration; it’s textual foreclosure that tests belief itself. No body remains, only the indictment of its unavailability to Black people.

Read this way, the tar, the welds, the intelligible RIFF file: fragments in a system predicated on our disposability, a system that no longer pretends to be fair. So, if the wager is rigged, as Green suspects, the only real question is whether you still play.

Originally published in Mousse 92.

Footnotes

1. Adrienne Edwards, “A Splinter to the Heart: On the Possibility of Afro-Pessimist Aesthetics,” ASAP/Journal 5, no. 2 (May 2020): 273–80. ↩︎
2. Edwards, “A Splinter to the Heart,” 274, 278. ↩︎
3. Oshay Green, text message with the author, April 26, 2025. ↩︎
4. Jacques Lacan argued that the unconscious is structured like language. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2001), 112. ↩︎