Aspen-born photographer Chloe Sells graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003, and has since continued to progress as an artist that questions the finite nature of our planet, our existence and the lines in between.
With a unique method placed somewhere between documentary and analogue layering, Sells uses medium and large format cameras and sometimes works upon the surface of developed works using paint, marker and ink.
Returning to Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, this December, the artist draws up dialogues between the everyday and the fantastical: the thought that we can both capture and manipulate images to evoke certain emotions, even if these images are a process of experimentation in themselves.
Shaking the Memory © Chloe Sells
She captures the Makgadikgadi Salt Pan in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana in technicolour, at once marvelling at the natural landscape and making wider decisions about style and an imagined world. Sells creates her own horizons with scores of pink, blue and orange pens, imitating a sunset through an artificial means and having a personalised conversation with the landscapes as if they could be her own. It is within this sense of mark-making that the artist finds resonance with the place, as she both connects to the desert and embarks on a new, kaleidoscopic vision which only she has created. Thus, the Earth can become a playground for experimentation.
