William Sellari

“Any conversation you have with William Sellari is going to be just a minefield of eggcorns and portmanteaux, which for a long time I thought was because he had no respect for language at all. It took me some time to figure out, with the help of his work, that while it’s true — he really has no respect for language at all — it’s central to his process of thinking, and being. His brain is a flipbook of eras, B-movies, references and resentments, the preposterous and the effortless, classic images of masculinity and moral quandaries, pets and children and toys you can almost remember owning when you were young, before you forgot what they meant.

”Will isn’t good at making work that isn’t born of a single moment, this week’s obsessions and ten years of review and repression and memory. This is good, because that’s when his work shines brightest: When the odd thought or image becomes a story about every possible thing. There’s unconscious melancholy and self-conscious absurdism, but it never places concept over context, or design over desire. And at the root of it, always something small, something he’s fought to recover from thirty years of hyperactive consumption, placed in the middle of the work like an arch’s keystone, that makes it less and more than just a personal recollection. That calls you back to it, across your own years.

”When you get the mystery box of photographs, from your grandparents’ attic or a vintage store, all those postcards and junky broken things that are left over from a life, you might dig almost down to the bottom before something grabbed you: An old ratty baseball card, or a sepia print of somebody’s best friend, and there in the eyes of this long-ago dead person is something you recognize. That’s Will: Old-timey and honorable; ticklish, and chaotic. The oldest child you ever met, and the youngest man. He remembers, and through his art he gives back to us, shined up and new, the things that we’ve forgotten.” — Jacob Clifton