Biography
Asé Selah is a mixed media and collage artist born in Hahira, Georgia, whose work reflects the nuanced realities of the Black diaspora. His journey began in Valdosta, Georgia, where he grew up under the guidance of his single mother, navigating the complexities of life with his siblings. Their transition to New Haven, Connecticut, and subsequent moves through various cities exposed them to a recurring pattern of racism, marginalization, gang culture, violence, and police brutality. Yet, through these challenges, Asé found resilience and joy, uncovering the beauty and strength within shared experiences.
His artistic practice is an exploration of sankofic continuity, delving into Blackness as both space and site. Asé reconstructs and deconstructs these spaces to reclaim them from historical erasure, cultivating new narratives that celebrate the richness of Black culture, traditions, and lived experiences. By engaging a diverse array of materials from sourced objects, textiles, and photographs. He challenges conventional perceptions of Black space.
Asé’s work encompasses eclectic forms, including paintings, sculptures, installations, and collages, where he delves into themes of repetition, variation, pairing, deconstruction, and reconstruction. He creates dialogues between his pieces and the viewer through the interplay of pattern, contrast, and graphic forms, reflecting the potential within any given system to reveal new dimensions and possibilities.
Ultimately, his art serves as a portal for dialogue, inviting viewers to engage with the complexities of shared histories and the potential for resilience and joy amidst socio-economic constructs. Through his work, Asé Selah seeks to illuminate the richness of the Black experience, fostering understanding and connection in a world that often overlooks these vital narratives. This heartfelt engagement with the Black experience is at the core of his artistic mission as he strives to leave a lasting impact on the art community and beyond.
"The purpose of my work is to provide portals into blackness. I aim to create dialogues that extend past the precarities that influenced the black gaze. The dialogue I propose between the work and the viewer is that Blackness is not flat. Although we have shared experiences we do not all have the same experience thus forming the awareness of void regarding the black diaspora’s image. This void my practice touches on is translated as Negative space. I associate this idea of negative space as an absence. Through the modalities of Pan-Africanism my work is to fill in the gaps of misinformed portrayals of myths versus realities of black people that is not flat. There’s this negative space that we don’t all get to exist in. Sometimes we do, but not always. In most cases when black bodies are being encountered we are being sorted. This gaze serves as a constant reminder that we have always been a project to colonialism." -Asé