BIOGRAPHY
Selia Salzsieder is a multidisciplinary artist and educator based in Madison, Wisconsin. She received her undergraduate degree in 2017 from the University of Wisconsin- Madison, where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing & Painting and a minor in Gender & Women's Studies. She also holds a post-baccalaureate Bachelor of Science degree in Art Education.
Selia is an elementary and middle school art teacher, a private art instructor, and a full time artist. She participates in art markers, craft fairs, and solo/ group exhibitions in Wisconsin throughout the year, and sells artwork in a variety of locations.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am not just an artist, but a collector, organizer, archivist. My artistic practice is grounded in investigating and recontextualizing visual culture, approaching collage as a form of research and preservation. My collection of vintage and antique books, magazines, and ephemera functions as an archive of who we have been. The paper and ink hold evidence of these histories and ask an essential question: who do we want to become? Rather than allowing these images to fade into obscurity, I repurpose and reimagine them. The aesthetics of the past become sites of investigation and discovery, where meaning is neither fixed nor neutral.
My collage practice interrogates the depiction of women and marginalized bodies in popular media, and the ways desirability has become intertwined with value and worth. Many of the images I work with originate from histories shaped by the male gaze, one of the most dominant forces in Western visual culture. Women’s bodies have filled the canon of art history for millennia, yet they persist as sites of fascination, controversy, desire, and repulsion. My work does not reinforce prevailing beauty standards; instead, it questions who is represented, what is emphasized, and whose perspectives are being centered.
Found imagery is meticulously cut, rearranged, and assembled to construct new narratives in which bodies and nature intertwine. Botanical and scientific illustrations frequently appear in my work, referencing the long historical association between femininity, nature, and systems of classification and control. Through these interventions, the body becomes fragmented, obscured, and censored, detaching the image from its original context and intent. This intervention both references and challenges the objectification within the source material, and creates opportunity for new interpretations.
For the past decade, my work has been driven by a curiosity about how artistic intervention can alter meaning. Central to this practice is my own positionality and the question of what happens when the hand of a fat, disabled, queer woman attempts to recontextualize this visual history. Through collage, I seek not only to critique the past, but to intervene in it, by reshaping its narratives and insisting on new possibilities.
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