Meredith Sellers’ work considers the mediated image and its relationship to power, violence, 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, offering a collision of image and text with pop-ups, banners, and hover ads, all sourced from our own internet searches. Both windows act as portals or gateways, one static and familiar, the other infinite and labyrinthian.
Her paintings depict windows — and made in size of windows from spaces the artist has a special relation to — that are obfuscated, providing only glimpses into stock photos and borrowed images. Forced into conversation, seemingly unrelated images form their own enigmatic languages.
Most recently, she has been utilizing images of car crashes as metaphor for the violent tensions that underscore contemporary American society. The visceral wreckage offers a subtext of toxic rage, blind selfishness, and careless abandon, some of American society’s most pervasive ills. 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.
Meredith Sellers (b. 1988, Baltimore, USA) is an artist and writer living and working in Philadelphia. Sellers holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. She has exhibited at Workplace, London, UK; Take It Easy, Atlanta, GA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Lord Ludd, Philadelphia, PA; and Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA, among others. Her work has been featured in Art Papers, Young Space, Maake Magazine, and White Column’s Curated Artist Registry. Her writing has appeared in publications including Hyperallergic, The Philadelphia Inquirer, ICA Philadelphia’s Notes, Pelican Bomb, and American Craft Magazine.