Painting from the Smoked Tilapia series, acrylic on paper, 30 by 22 inches, Massa Lemu, 2010
Houston's bayous are fantastically bizarre. Some stretches of Buffalo, Little White Oak, Greens, and other bayous appear close to a "natural" state. Others are radically engineered by humans into straightened trapezoidal forms. Strangest of all, however, are the ways sediment, plants, and animals remain or reestablish. Seen the fish jumping along Brays? If you live here long enough, though, the bayous can almost be forgotten as backdrop to life. It takes an outsider to defamiliarize our landscape.
Born and educated in Malawi, Africa, Mass Lemu offers that outsider vision. He left his homeland for the first time to study at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he completed a masters. He was then awarded a Core fellowship by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Glassell School of Art. He also taught drawing at Rice University.
"When I came to Houston, I saw these huge fish in the concrete bayous," he says. "I thought it was an abstraction. A natural living thing in a constructed thing. I took the shape of a fish and mixed it with the form of the bayou. It is a hybrid, a cyborg. Not a fish. Not a bayou."
The paintings he produced in a 2010 series called Smoked Tilapia are haunting and beautiful, as well as morbid and disturbing. What could be taken to be fish have their heads lopped off. They ooze an oil-like fluid.
Simply as images on their own, with no narrative tagged on, the paintings are compelling, but Lemu's own perspective links our local drainage system to Lake Malawi. In Texas, tilapia are a relatively cheap fish, a farmed fish on ice at the grocery, and an invasive species that thrives in strange places like power plant discharges and concrete bayous. Malawi, in contrast, is known for the native endangered species of tilapia that is poached from its big lake. There, the tilapia is an innocent, edible, and dear fish. An incredible reversal! I was reminded of the film Darwin's Nightmare about the catastrophic effects of the international fishing industry on Lake Victoria in Tanzania.
Lemu's unnerving cyborg bayou-tilapia give us a chance to reflect on globalization, the way in which trade and migration can upset delicate ecosystems and repopulate what appears ruined.
