Tara Sellios, a Boston-based artist, creates hauntingly beautiful photographs that explore the fragile tension between life and death. Working with organic materials such as animal bones, insect specimens, and dried flowers, she constructs elaborate still-life scenes that evoke both reverence and unease. Captured with a large-format 8 x 10 camera, her compositions reveal a meticulous attention to texture and form, where every feather, petal, and fragment becomes a meditation on impermanence and the natural cycle of decay.
Sellios draws deeply from the visual language of Christian devotional art, echoing the spiritual intensity of illuminated manuscripts, altarpieces, and stained-glass windows. Her work also resonates with the vanitas tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch painting, in which symbols of mortality remind viewers of the fleeting nature of existence. Yet, rather than moralizing, her images invite contemplation—transforming decay into something transcendent, even sacred. The grotesque becomes luminous, the ruined becomes reborn.
Her latest series, Ask Now the Beasts, takes its title from the Book of Job, a biblical text that contemplates the mysteries of suffering, nature, and divine order. Through this body of work, Sellios examines the harvest and the apocalypse as intertwined forces, suggesting that death and renewal are inseparable. Within these intricate compositions, the earth’s cycles unfold—a quiet revelation of endurance, regeneration, and the eternal dialogue between destruction and creation.
Opening January 18, 2025, at the Fitchburg Art Museum, Ask Now the Beasts will remain on view through the end of the year. The exhibition offers an immersive encounter with Sellios’s vision—a world where beauty blooms amid ruin, and where the boundaries between devotion, mortality, and art dissolve into one continuous breath of life and loss.
Image: Tara Sellios, Abundantia, ink jet print, 2023. Courtesy of the Artist. © Tara Sellios
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