Artist presentation

Tara Sellios

Tara Sellios is a multidisciplinary artist working mainly in large format photography and also in drawing, sculpture and installation. Since receiving her BFA in photography/art history in 2010, she has exhibited both locally and nationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Ask Now the Beasts at Fitchburg Art Museum (Fitchburg, MA, USA) Infernalis at Gallery Kayafas (Boston, MA, USA), Sinuous at C. Grimaldis Gallery (Baltimore, MD, USA) and Testimony at Blue Sky Gallery (Portland, OR, USA). Her work has been included in several group exhibitions locally and internationally, the most recent being inclusion in Photo Brussels Festival (Brussels, Belgium). She is a multiple Massachusetts Cultural Council Award Fellow and has appeared on the cover of Photograph magazine and Art New England, amongst others. Her work is part of several permanent collections, including The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Museum of Photographic Art @ San Diego Museum of Art, The Danforth Museum and the RISD Museum. Her visceral, highly detailed photographs are intensely planned and process oriented, often using organic matter like animal skeletons and real, dried insects. Using an 8×10 view camera, she photographs these arrangements which result in dramatic, painterly still-life photographs wrought with sensuality, lightness and darkness, and religious symbolism. She currently lives and works in her South Boston studio in Massachusetts, USA.

Artist statement

I strive to create images that elegantly articulate the totality of existence, focusing heavily on life’s underlying instinctive, carnal nature in the face of fragility and impermanence. The concept of morality in relation to mortality has possessed a significant presence within the history of art, ranging from religious altarpiece imagery to the work of the vanitas painters. Manifesting melancholic themes with beauty, precision and seduction forces the viewer to look, despite its grotesque and morbid nature. Through these images, I aspire to make apparent the restlessness of a life that is knowingly so temporary and vulnerable.

Ask Now the Beasts derives its title from the Biblical text of Job. The symbolism in these frames conjure ideas of the cyclical nature of the earth in relation to the concept of the harvest. Once a time of prosperity, richness and eroticism, the offerings here are withered on the vine. Light strikes from the left as if to indicate the passage of days grown too long. The earth passes away, but that is not to say that there is no hope - suffering and death leads to transcendence and transformation. Within the dance between light and darkness, beauty and celebration can still be found. These images, reminiscent of an altarpiece structure, are wrought with complex references and allusions to stained glass windows, illuminated manuscripts, and other genres of religious imagery intended for meditation, storytelling and reverence.