Artists
United States of America
Michael Sell
Ex-pat/Wanderlust
22.11.22 16.12.22
While at ´ace, Michael Sell took advantage of the tranquility and the solitude of The Tower studio to move out of his usual medium and activities (photography, portraying and teaching) and gently slide in the realm of watercolour landscapes picturing the streets of Buenos Aires and its particular details. Equipped with his brushes, some notebooks and the watercolours themselves, Mike was able to refresh his ways of seeing, to enjoy the city with a new perspective and to experience first-hand the heated frenzy that football generates in the local population, as Argentina’s national team won the World Cup—and Mike was there to capture it all, watching every match elbow-to-elbow with local fans. From these experiences, a series of pictures came to be, which were shown together with a notebook filled with the watercolour landscapes.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am an educator and artist living and working in Northeastern Oregon. I am primarily a photographer who shoots with a large format film camera, creating portraits that conceptually revolve around different subcultures.
In Camera Lucida, author Roland Barthes declared photography the medium of “that-has-been,” immediately relegating the instantaneous nature of the photograph’s subject to the graveyard of the past; while serving as a replicator of reality, photographs also are merely documents of a subject that will soon come to pass. Recently, I have been reflecting on that notion as I create new images, and I have come to accept that my photographs—like all photographs—precede the death of their subjects. This is the most true when I am making portraits. My current body of work, begun in 2016, consists of portraits of fans taken at concerts by the rock band Phish. In most cases, the subjects are people I have only just met, and these intimate images offer a stark contrast to the colorful, energetic psychedelia of Phish’s live shows. Through these images I am examining constructed personality, taxonomy, and how I expose elements of myself—namely, my own fandom and mortality—through images of others.
BIO
Michael Sell
1981 | Detroit, MI, USA
Lives and works in La Grande, OR, USA
EDUCATION
2009 | MFA Photography, Kendall College of Art and Design, Grand Rapids, MI, USA
EXHIBITIONS
2020 | RANSOM 2, Brooklyn Wayfarers Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
2020 | EOU Art Department Faculty Exhibition, Nightingale Gallery, La Grande, OR
2020 | Identity, Midwest Center for Photography, Wichita, KS
2015 | Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI
2014 | The Homunculus Collection, Hobusepea Gallery, Tallinn, Estonia
AWARDS
2020 | A Portrait of Your Past, 12th International Conference on the Image, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
2019 | Photo Gods & Rock ’n’ Roll Monsters, First Annual Phish Studies Conference, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR
2019 | Photo Gods & Rock ’n’ Roll Monsters, Popular and American Culture Association National Conference, Washington, D.C.
2016 | New Portraits, Society for Photographic Education NW Conference, Seattle, WA
2014 | Invited speaker, artist talk, Hobusepea Galerii, Tallinn, Estonia
Related Activities
´aceNITE, Exhibitions
Revelations
Artists in Dialogue
06.12.22
What is the nature of reality? Do we all experience the same reality? How is it revealed?
Catching sleep every night, when insomnia appears, thinking does not stop and our eyes remain open even though we close them, when anguish or perhaps fear of increasingly threatening shadows occurs… it is at that moment that we are in a bit out of reality? On the contrary, when we fall asleep and dream, within the dream, no matter how absurd what we dream is, we feel that it is real. How do you experience the supernatural, that which cannot be explained by the laws of nature or that exceeds its limits, that set off realities, known by revelation or admitted by faith? Do these facts, which are not entitatively natural, exist as well as the facts of the natural world?
What are the limits? Do these limits exist? Or do you flow between wakefulness, sleep and the state in between?
In Insomnis, Heesoo Agnes Kim plays with the notion of dreams, deals with issues of self-identification, explores the limits between time, light and life. With his camera, Mitchell Sell discovers the phenomenon of blurring of social and political boundaries that occurred in Buenos Aires when Argentina won its third World Cup. Alex Karolyi in The Unknown, works with true supernatural and paranormal stories (in this case related to the house of ´ace itself) in a performative way, considering that everyone has a story to share, whether visible or invisible. Finally, Hee Ju Im in Outputs investigates those sounds that are constantly heard but overlooked, a being that is everywhere but does not reveal itself, a being that cannot define limits or a being that erases limits, and therefore both a being of “otherness” thrown out of bounds. All of them, from different perspectives, reveal to us fluctuating aspects of our “realities”.
ALICIA CANDIANI
