Asé Selah

SAIC SHOWS 2025 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Graduates

SAIC SHOWS 2025 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts Degree

Asé Selah is an interdisciplinary artist whose work centers on Black Interior Geographies—a conceptual lens grounded in material memory, spatial agency, and the politics of visibility. Working with drywall, wood, wire, fabric, and archival textiles, Selah builds sculptural and wall-based installations that engage Black domesticity, memory, and ancestral trace.
Rooted in Black studies, phenomenology, and the aesthetics of refusal, his practice explores how interior life becomes a space for being beyond performance, beyond interrogation, without spectacle. Through a deliberate use of everyday materials, Selah transforms surfaces into portals—sites that refuse erasure and assert Black. presence on its own terms.

Across forms, his work honors the intimate architecture of Black life; not as spectacle, but as lineage, refusal, and the right to simply exist.

When i grow up., 2025. Mixed media on drywall fragment, wallpaper, archival photograph, oil pastel, and graphite.

This work considers the layered conditions of Black childhood where imagination meets confinement, and where dreams unfold against the backdrop of inherited walls. A torn piece of domestic space becomes a stage for memory and mark-making: scribbles, stars, and letters gesture toward both learning and becoming. It resists the surveillance often placed on Black youth and instead insists on play, softness, and interiority. In a world that often interrogates Black being before it affirms it, When I Grow Up becomes both a question and an answer offering a portal back to possibility, authored from within.

To be seen, 2025. Mixed media on drywall fragment, archival photographs, wire, house paint, pastel, and fabric.

To be seen explores the tension between containment and passage, how Black youth navigate structures never built for their freedom. Embedded in the fragment of a wall, the figures appear behind layers of graffiti, stars, tape, and brick-like patterning, suggesting both confinement and refusal. Wire juts out from the surface like fractured scaffolding, while layered gestures of mark-making, erasure, and repetition evoke the textures of interior spaces lived in, marked up, and made ours. A portal carved through domestic material, where presence becomes undeniable, and memory is mapped onto the architecture of the everyday.

Pass me the Blue Magic.., 2025. Mixed media on drywall fragment, archival photograph, fabric, wallpaper, acrylic, graphite, and found materials.

Like memory, time fades as I run my fingers through my hair, a quiet gesture, fingers to scalp, my crown, my favorite couch. I think I'll sit here for a while..

Starseeds, 2025. Mixed media on mannequins, spray paint, acrylic, American flags, kente cloth, gold fabric, hand picked cotton, raffia, thread, wire, safety pins.

Each figure stands wrapped in fabric and memory, still but not silent. Their bodies become maps layered with cotton, Kente, and flags tracing history that never disappeared. The stars above them are not symbols, but open portals. This is a return to presence, to lineage, to the interior geographies carried in Black flesh. Not reenactment, a resistance to erasure.

Starlite, 2025. Archival photographs, acrylic, glue, digital collage.

We are not waiting to be discovered. We’ve been here. Scattered like Stars in the constellation, stitched into the ceilings of rooms too small to hold us. Not every star needs the sky. Some live in the body. Some hide in a gaze. Some unfold only when touched by memory. We are portals. Not to escape, but to return. Each body, a map.  A refusal to vanish. To be seen is not the goal. To be boundless, that is the inheritance.

My work begins in the interior, in the spaces that often go unnoticed or unspoken. I’m drawn to the poetics of survival,
not just what endures,
but how we’ve learned to live deeply inside what we make. A scrap of drywall, a piece of wire, a faded photograph, a strip of fabric passed down through generations. These materials carry memory. They remember what the world tries to forget.
I explore what I call Black Interior Geographies, the emotional, physical, and spiritual landscapes of Black life lived beyond the gaze. I’m interested in presence without performance, in what it means to take up space without having to explain yourself. My work is about portals, thresholds, and the quiet power of what’s already within us.
Sometimes the figures are abstract. Sometimes they emerge from fragments. Sometimes it’s just a gesture, a fold, a line, a shadow, that says enough. I don’t want to recreate the spectacle of Black life. I want to sit with its intimacy, its slowness, its residue. The stars, in my work, aren’t just in the sky, they’re in the corners of rooms, in the texture of fabric, in the ways we make create agency out of what we’re given. There is a cosmology in our interiors. Even in stillness, we are in motion, mapping, bending, reshaping the world around us. My practice is a way of listening to what the material knows, and building from that knowing a language that doesn’t ask to be translated.

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