Congratulations to Tara Sellios who is preparing to exhibit work at the Fitchburg Museum of Art in spring 2025. In celebration of the news, we share two new panels to the larger altarpiece, Ask Now the Beasts, Sellios is now creating for the exhibition that will have the same name. The title is a direct reference to a Biblical passage, Job 12:7.

In the latest addition to Tara Sellios’ Ask Now the Beasts (view more panels for the altarpiece here) we are presented with double portraits of a doe and a buck. The pair face away from one another and use light and symbolism to direct our interpretation. The light in these works come from the left as if to indicate a more lush or optimistic view while the second panel is darker, more psychological. Together these photographs may read as a caution that abundance can lead to waste.

The skeleton of a doe- glorious as a goddess- wears a halo of praying mantids that look like a jeweled crown. Iridescent wings glisten against a pitch background. Dry pink roses that spill from her mouth seem to have withered as if frozen on the vine of time. The doe holds a dry cornucopia of fall and winter fruit- grapes and pomegranate- symbols that promise to stave off the bite of winter. Bees hover over empty honeycomb in the perished offering, adorned by broken blades of golden wheat, most of the grain torn loose from the shaft.

Her mate the buck has a row of teeth that glisten with a jester’s smile- dazzling, ominous. Offerings have become sacrifice. His keen snout is shoved into the bottom of an emptied wineglass, broken at the stem, shattered at the coup. The once proud rack of his antlers are entangled in a bramble of thorned rose vines. His hooves, bound by ropes are adorned by a single dry pink rose. Its petals fall away. This is the dark and meager side of fate. Vanity and wealth – materiality and tangibility have led to excess, dependance, and ultimately, destruction. The kind that drinks the poison with glee.