Nabil Mousa, an Arab-American artist originating from Syria, courageously embraces his personal experiences of vulnerability, persecution, and marginalization as the driving force behind his artistic practice. Mousa has spent his entire career creating very personal, powerful installations and artworks around hope, healing, and survival, no matter what ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or whatever else might exist outside the norms of society. The distressing image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi washing up dead on the shores of the Mediterranean while fleeing Syria in 2017 brought the stakes of his work into vivid terms.

This experience inspired a new body of work, Fractured, which he began in earnest that same year; he decided to rummage around abandoned warehouses for material to appropriate. He found a piece of old plywood left exposed to the sun, rain, and wind. When he started to pull on it, the wood began fracturing and crumbling in his hands, and he smiled at the beauty of these humble, composite pieces. While he wasn’t sure what he’d do with them, eventually these pieces would end up on wood panels, along with rusted nuts and bolts, wires, broken cups, and other building material. Like the plywood, these objects were made of many pieces, yet the aesthetic leaned “less is more,” with heavy gesso, staples, and white paint turning the surface into a kind of clean monochrome. In all, he made five works like these. Having no venue to show them, Mouse put them in storage.

After moving to Seattle for his husband’s job in 2018, Mousa went camping in the woods, where he found pieces of driftwood in a river, rekindling his Fractured project anew; working with these objects in his Columbus, Ohio studio, Mousa noticed burlap laying on the floor, which he decided to incorporate into his series, as well as paper bags from Trader Joes and Whole Foods. He ripped them into smaller pieces and collaged them onto canvas. Gesso, wood, then paint were layered onto the surface. In working with and analyzing these materials, Mousa realized that we are all, in a way, adrift like his humble wooden flotsam, trying to find supportive communities to settle with. How we do such a thing is the ultimate question.