MJ Seltzer

Born in the middle of the 20th century, I inherited the traditional recipes for gender interpretation from a Barbie nation and first-generation eastern European ancestry. My portraits trace the slow and steady process of change and transformation of these indentured views of gender, sexuality, and selfhood. My work voices this feminine perspective of both identity and self-discovery, in part, drawn out of an urgency to come to terms with the emotional reactions to aging and our shifting masks of identity.

The drawing constructions form a body of work spanning nine years. Painted, drawn and sanded, their media include iron oxide, aluminum, graphite and other minerals in powdered or liquid form. Collage is used in relief, adding dimension and visual inflection. Composition is based on symbolic associations, and incorporates language, often American Sign Language, as cues to viewer interpretation. Each of the works forms an intimate confession, of friends, family or self – like open diaries, written in black and white. As such, they speak to our basic need for sharing, on a deep and personal level.

The encaustic portraits, created in an intrinsically luminescent medium, explode in both color and texture, while offering the added richness of relief, modeling, inlay and collage. Dating back to ancient Greece encaustic painting, the work is labor intensive and technically complex. Pigments are mixed with molten beeswax, kept fluid on a hot plate, then applied in even layers and fused with more heat to a support. Composed of individual, painted wood tiles, the portraits are “quilted” together to form a rich, highly nuanced composition. While every tile is a separate study, each bears a unique relationship to or interdependency with adjacent and surrounding tiles. The quilt assemblage is infused with symbolic and representational interpretations, as well as abstract celebrations of color. Images range from portraits, still-life subjects, landscapes to nonobjective abstracts and appropriations from the history of art.

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