BIOGRAPHY
Chloe Sells was born in Aspen, Colorado and began photographing in 1993. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design, from which she graduated in 2000 and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography with honors. For two years thereafter, she worked at Anderson Ranch in Aspen, Colorado with Terri Weifenbach, John Gossage, Donald Sultan and Ann Lauterbach. She was personal assistant to Hunter S. Thompson for two years preceding his death. She is currently studying her Masters in Fine Art and Central St. Martins and lives between London and Botswana.
TOOLS
Chloe uses a Contax 645 and Linhof 4x5 to create her pictures and uses film. The photographs are darkroom C-type prints, most commonly in series of 5 or editions of 9.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Land, as the setting within which we enact our lives, where our memories subsist and our history is born, exerts a subtle power over us, eliciting a broad range of emotions. As a landscape encompasses and implicates its viewer, my purpose is to use this potential to inspire discussion about place and placelessness and to form meaning through nostalgia, the sublime and the exotic.
Every association holds in its grip the paradox of disassociation, and so it is with nature as understood through our urbanized world-view. Thus, in a broader sense, the varied topography within the imagery has been chosen to mirror the migrations and movements of people today with the human reshaping of the natural world from its ‘original’ state to its current condition of layered and perpetual permutations.
I have developed a way of working, which allows me to direct my line of questioning in an idiosyncratic manner through clearly defined manipulation. In the darkroom, by means of layered prismatic color the places in my images push outwards and upwards, revealing their vital state of constant flux. I use geometric angles and constructed planes to suggest our interference with nature and the desire to control the uncontrollable. These planes visually stretch the image in places, as memory is stretched to remember the subtleties of an experience. Folds conceal parts of the image and give the impression of a page to be turned, a story being told, history.
For me the physicality of land runs parallel to the physicality inherent in my darkroom and studio interface, enabling me to interact with the represented place in each image on my own terms and to reflect on my relationships and experiences. Each outcome is unique. As a result of this artifice, the places within each of these images wonder if they are real or imagined.