/pərˈsēv/ /tu/ /ikˈspōz/: Mariah Selitsch Fyke and Katherine Stanley

/pərˈsēv/ /tu/ /ikˈspōz/ is the MFA thesis exhibition featuring photographic works by Mariah Selitsch Fyke and Katherine Stanley.

Art has an ability to engage viewers by bringing them to a particular moment in a situation and environment that the artist has created. Photographer Mariah Selitsch Fyke has been singled out her entire life, predominantly by complete strangers, because of the color of her skin and other physical attributes that would qualify her as different. In the series "Interstice" (2016), Fyke is exploring what visual cues prompt people to read her body as foreign, registering her as "other," in relation to a particular space. She inserts herself into people's homes and daily routines and hides herself in plain sight, often just showing her legs, to create a visual pun establishing a foreign aesthetic. With her work, she creates an indirect confrontation with the viewer, as her body is not always the first thing you see upon viewing the photographs.

Stanley's "Acquired Aberration" series (2015) explores the relationship between human constructed experience and human landscape through the use of altered perception, photographic language, and the passage of time. By constructing photographic montages, the photograph becomes the vehicle through which we question our perception by transforming our normal way of seeing. Borrowing cubist aesthetic strategies, the images physically and internally change our focus and perspective with the use of numerous vantage points. This removed sense of analysis alters our expectations and challenges what we think we know. The photographic language becomes a dialogue and an exploration between the familiar and the unsettling, the stable and the unstable, between believability and disorientation.