After Images

About

An afterimage lingers in the mind’s eye, a shadow of the original image created by photochemical activity in the retina. Other types of periodically recurring images cannot be explained by chemistry. Some recurrent images may be related to traumatic events, which embed themselves in our memory, careening in at inopportune moments. Other images recur inorganically, as in the copy. The signifier “after” is used to describe the copy, especially in the context of copies made of old masters, often by printers dispersing iterations of an artwork or by students. The digital image is reproduced with such frenetic frequency that the term “copy” feels too slow, too archaic, to be useful in this context. These digital simulacra produce perhaps a different kind of afterimage—a feeling of familiarity, or an uncanniness, burnt into cultural memory through their endless multiplicity. 

In After Images, Meredith Sellers probes questions around the nature of the image. Her paintings appropriate slices of works by artists like Ingres and Dutch painter of floral still lifes Jan van Huysum, as well as stock photography, advertising, archives, news media, and other sources to explore a space of collapse. Painting images of destruction, rot, and conspiracy alongside art historical imagery, she draws parallels between beauty and ugliness, life and death, and entrenched systems of power and the societal ills they sow.

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.