Kansas City Art Institute Students Genesis Koussiafes and Isabella Matute will be having their Senior thesis show this March.
-Genesis Koussiafes is a print and installation artist from Miami, Florida. She creates narrative images indicative of anxieties stemming from isolation, displacement, and loneliness. Her work makes extensive use of print-based techniques such as letterpress, relief, cyanotypes, and laser-cut materials such as paper, plexiglass, and mylar.
-Isabella Matute’s theatrical photo series, gender performer, is the artist’s provocative photographic response to a family archive of the artist’s gender normative performances in her childhood well into young adulthood. The artist believes gender to be a performance ofexpected and idealized gender roles tied to her multicultural experience as a HispanicAmerican. Social integration is a reward given to those that perform recognizable performancesof their genders. In these self-portraits, the artist showcases vignettes of her multi-facetedidentity. She portrays her varied roles as director, actor, Latina, ex-dancer, etc. These works aidin answering questions the artist poses about herself. Some of these photographs are achallenge to represented gender ideals while other photographs explore a new facet of theartist’s self. The artist seeks autobiographical representations of her life. See Less