STATEMENT OF WORK

Meredith Sellers

My work considers the mediated image and its relationship to power, desire, and apathy through the frame of the window as both an architectural and digital space. Painting has been discussed as a window since the Quattrocento, illusionistically offering a view into another realm outside our own. The window as a phenomenological space allows us to look out into the world, yet simultaneously acts as a barrier, isolating us from it. In more recent times, another window has become a pervasive presence in our daily lives—the screen, containing windows within windows of text and image. Both act as portals or gateways, one static and familiar, the other infinite and labyrinthian. My paintings are sized to windows of spaces I frequent. They are obfuscated, layered with rectangles like pop-up ads, providing glimpses into images borrowed from art historical painting, news media, and stock photography. Forced into conversation, seemingly unrelated images form their own enigmatic languages.

Most recently, I have been employing found imagery of car crashes. The crash serves as metaphor for the violence, apathy, and deep political division in contemporary American life, as well as being a literal depiction of the fossil fuel dependence contributing to the increasing warming of the planet. Over the course of the pandemic, per-capita vehicle deaths rose by nearly 20 percent, arguably a symptom of so-called “social disengagement,” a fracturing of the empathetic binds of civilized society. This nihilistic selfishness and despair is personified in the twisted wreckage of the crash, set next to images of both literal and metaphorical destruction; a melting ice shelf, or fruit rotting on the vine.

My previous body of work explored symbols of memento mori in historical Dutch Golden Age painting. These depictions of death flourished in the 16th and 17th centuries and could be as overt as a skull by an extinguished candle or as subtle as ant traversing a flower petal: a sign of bodily corruptibility. Such still lives utilized goods as seemingly anodyne signifiers of wealth, power, and godliness, with underlying moral messages. But the objects represented also document colonial violence and the emergence of a consumer society—the first seeds of a global capitalist market built upon the exploitation of others’ land, resources, and labor—which has expanded exponentially in the centuries since and continues to underpin contemporary life in the Western world and beyond. Through the juxtaposition of opulent floral still lifes alongside stock photos, art historical imagery, and archival images of riots, these paintings consider the origins of violence and destruction in Western capitalist consumer culture.

My paintings are self-reflexive, looking at the history of the medium itself and asking questions about painting’s culpablity in enforcing images of power—while also marveling at its innate beauty. The mediated images I paint coexist in a state of constant friction, begging the question of how the acquired contexts of the images we accumulate complicate our perceptions. Every painting is a window, but are you looking out or in?