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. Sized to physical 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.

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.