Luxuria
Gallery Kayafas is pleased to present Tara Sellios’ most recent group of photographs and watercolors, Luxuria. Not unlike 17th century Dutch still life painting, Sellios’ photographs are formal compositions of apparently sumptuous repasts – table linens smeared with fluids, strewn with crumbs left from gluttonous exchanges and lavish banquets. These large-scale watercolors and multi-paneled color photographs vibrate with realism and physical presence. Sellios seeks to represent the totality of human existence, the feel, even the smell of it. We are invited to experience the lasciviousness of the consumption of food and wine – of life passing. The imagery is beautifully unsettling and raw. We are visually satiated. Life and Death inhabit the same moment.
Sellios’ photographs are intensely planned and before any image is made with her 8x10” view camera she draws out each still life planning every detail of its arrangement. The 7 large format photographs in Luxuria have a dark background with the foreground reaching toward the viewer. We are seduced. In addition to the photographs, she has made 4 very large watercolors (about 84x50”). As with the photographs, the paintings are abundant with information – we are rewarded by looking – her imagination translated to paper fills our senses and we over-indulge and celebrate the profusion of visual stimuli.
I strive to create images that elegantly articulate the totality of existence, focusing heavily on the broad themes of life and death, with further emphasis placed on ideas of fragility, impermanence and carnality. Death has always possessed a significant presence within the history of art, ranging from altarpieces to the work of the Dutch still life painters. Manifesting melancholic themes with beauty and precision, as these artists did, results in an image that is seductive, forcing the viewer to look, despite its apparent grotesque and morbid nature. Through these images, I aspire to make apparent the restlessness of a life that is knowingly so temporary and vulnerable. -Tara Sellios
Sellios graduated from The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University in 2010. She has been awarded an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a Curator’s prize at the Griffin Museum of Photography. Art New England Magazine named her one of New England’s “Seven Emerging Photographers”; she received an international award from Flash Forward 2011 by the Magenta Foundation in Toronto. The current issue of Photograph magazine features an image from Luxuria on the cover with an accompanying article. This is her third show at the Gallery.