Five on the First

July 2024
Chelsea Seltzer

Within the last few years Chelsea Seltzer’s work has turned towards fantastical landscapes which invoke both the epic, awe-inspiring beauty and power of our natural world juxtaposed with an underlying sense of foreboding which one might associate with environmental panic or solastalgia. The fodder for these dreamscapes are scraped together from place memories, sci-fi films, accounts of environmental accidents and the heavily filtered backgrounds of wannabe influencer selfies. Though the paintings are free of humans, in their absence there becomes a presence and within that space, Seltzer explores the imprint humanity has on the land and conversely, the land’s imprint on humanity. The candy coloured palette of the work helps push the paintings into a sort of hyper-landscape, familiar to us but also altered and heightened to look like a scene from another world. In the spirit of the rich tradition of the sublime Romantic landscape painting, these super-chromatic dreamscapes underscore humankind's tenuous relationship with nature.

CV