One untitled diptych, for instance, features a platter of uncooked meat, arrayed as if ready for the banquet table. The platter, on the left, boasts a glistening red cut of beef, a delicately pink array of pigs’ feet pointing upward like the toe shoes of a chorus of ballerinas, a lobster, and a bulbous, sectioned item that I, with some queasiness, took for a brain, but gallery director James Hull reports is actually a kidney. But the most prominent item is a plump, plucked goose, whose long, limp neck splays over into the print on the right. Much of the food in this elegantly arrayed still life is still animal-like enough to turn even a staunch carnivore’s stomach.
Sellios strides right into the territories between nourishment and violence, between how we anthropomorphize animals and how we use them. But her main fascination is the realm that mingles attraction and repulsion, and how art uses beauty to anoint violence, make it more palatable, and raise it to mythic realms.
Some of these works (they’re all untitled) push too hard - such as a bowlful of what looks like blood splattering on a white tablecloth, and one of blood (or wine?) overflowing a goblet. There are a few of Sellios’s deft sketches on hand too, and the watercolor and ink version of the flooding goblet is much more effective than the photograph - the flood like a waterfall, and agitated by staticky black lines.
Yet the watercolors are expressionistic, not hyper-real, like a photo or a Dutch still life painting, and consequently less threatening. Photos are the perfect realm for this kind of work, because they pretend to be real and true, even if they are fictions. In her photographs, the more details Sellios orchestrates in a single piece, such as in another still life of a feast, a lush yet terrible image of seafood, the more she seduces the viewer to look, and to feel delight and horror at the same time.
Interplay of light
