Asé Selah

Artist Statement 

My work begins in the interior, spaces that witness the body and hold what is often unspoken. Through drywall installations and acrylic skin forms, I explore how the interior remembers us, protects us, and shapes our sense of presence. Drywall functions as an architecture of witness, while acrylic skin becomes a phenomenological map of the body, a register of touch, rupture, movement, and return.

Both materials intersect around spatial agency, the body’s ability to imagine, define, and transform the spaces it occupies, not only physically but mentally and spiritually. I’m interested in how interior geographies affect us, especially when displacement interrupts continuity. This is where my practice enters the poetics of survival, understanding how one carries home within the body and how materials themselves hold knowledge of resilience.

The acrylic skin carries the tension of being seen before being understood. Its surface reveals how meaning, beauty, and value are often projected onto the body, yet it also pushes back, refusing reduction and insisting on multiplicity. The work moves beyond precarity toward empowerment, affirming that the body remains an active agent in shaping its interior world.

The spaces we build, inhabit, and eventually leave behind remain charged with memory. They hold traces of us, our gestures, our rituals, our presence. This continuity reflects a futurist sensibility, understanding Black space as expansive, generative, and enduring across time and transition. It approaches the body not as a site of limitation but as a source of knowledge, imagination, and possibility.

Through material and form, my work asserts that we are not confined to any imposed narrative. We move with resilience, carrying our own architectures of care, belonging, and becoming. The interior, of the body, the home, and the self, remains a site of agency where survival is transformation.