Oshay Green at
C L E A R I N G

Oshay Green, IF YOU DON’T GET YO SORRY ASS UP (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and CLEARING Los Angeles. Photo: Evan Walsh.

Oshay Green brings the compositional sensibility of a musician to IF YOU DON’T GET YO SORRY ASS UP with multivalent sculptures that translate the harmonies and dissonances of language and music into abstract forms that defy conventional legibility. Much like the improvisations of free jazz, his work mixes dense, dissonant textures into a transcendent, albeit obfuscated experience. 

The exhibition’s title, invoking speech, functions as an ominous conceptual directive. As if a punchline, most of the sculptures were constructed onsite from deconstructed couches purchased from Facebook Marketplace. Green isolates the basic materials of a couch (wood, staples, nails, fabric, foam, coils) before remixing them into new, polyphonic forms—wispy, hanging fabric pieces or jagged wooden assemblages. In Y- -M2-3- – (all works 2024), two wooden beams rest on the floor, sticking out from below a cascade of suede and mesh like the paws of the Great Sphinx of Giza. In YM1 -34-52, foamy white and yellow couch innards are splayed high on the wall, affixed with elastic webbing. In contrast to the pitch generated from sharp angles and pointed nails in the surrounding sculptures, it channels the aural sensation of a pillow stuffed into the core of a horn. 

Propped against the wall throughout are four plywood sheets laser-engraved with text from RIFF files—indecipherable strings of typographical symbols and punctuation marks extracted from corresponding audio recordings. Each text contains repeated phrases such as “Scared money don’t make money” and “Fuckin’ square,” but as RIFF “metadata,” they are indecipherable. Recalling jazz critic Ira Gitler’s term “sheets of sound,” coined to describe John Coltrane’s asymmetrical, cascading sounds and condensed spontaneity,¹ these works function as artifacts of the soundbites. Green’s exhibition is best understood as a permanent, physical recording of an unwitnessed live performance—but as commercial objects, the works are a bit confusing. The exhibition’s title seems to offer a key, where the looming threat of capitalism forces a nonstop hustle, egged on by fears of what might happen IF YOU DON’T. 

When free jazz emerged in the 1950s, listeners and critics puzzled over what felt like an alienating approach to music. What they likely missed was that legibility wasn’t the point. While Green’s cryptic numeric titles and the press release—a frustrating five pages of RIFF text—make the exhibition similarly difficult to access, his deliberate withholding ultimately refuses the expectation that an artist labor in service of the viewer. We are instead offered something more sincere than an explanation—an opportunity to translate these improvisational gestures for ourselves.

Oshay Green: IF YOU DON’T GET YO SORRY ASS UP runs from September 13–October 26, 2024 at C L E A R I N G (530 N. Western Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90004).