Bio: Carol Selter won the 1999-2000 Phelan Award in Art Photography and a Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art Award in Electronic Media in 1996. Her work has been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, San Francisco Camerawork, Gallery 16, and Harvard University. She’s had solo exhibitions at the Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery in Nevada, and at Smith Gallery in California. Her work is part of the collections of Rene and Veronica Di Rosa Foundation, John Pfahl, Robert Hirsch and Adele Henderson.


Statement: My work is about the way humans objectify other species, especially the way science searches for the secret of life in dead organisms and other isolated molecules. In the series, Animalia, the images are made by living animals as they move across a flatbed scanner. Resulting in a signature, time-lapse pattern unique to each species. After every scan, I make a thermal-wax printout of each computer file, which turns the already unnatural colors even more lurid and “atomizes” the image into halftone dots. When I copy the printout onto negative film and print it twice life size, the half-tone dots became—a metaphor—for the limitations of reductionist biology: the closer you look the less information you get about the image. Like the organism itself, the image emerges from the organization of its constituent parts. Thus, the most detailed examination of dots or molecules can never reveal the structures that emerge from their relationships.



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