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Rose Sellery

AUG 29 - JAN 3

Rose Sellery: Fragile Strength

Rose Sellery is a multidisciplinary, self-taught artist whose work navigates the charged terrain between beauty and brutality, fragility and strength, and tradition and rebellion. Through humor, irony, and unflinching confrontation, she explores themes of innocence and loss, societal pressure, resilience, and survival – inviting viewers to reflect on how lives, particularly women’s lives, are shaped, constrained, celebrated, and discarded.

Sellery transforms everyday materials into evocative sculptural narratives. Her work reimagines objects such as glass slippers, garments, and boxing gloves, imbuing them with layered meaning and emotional resonance. Whether through shattered forms, unconventional materials, or conceptual garments, each piece exposes the tension between vulnerability and power while honoring personal and collective stories. Her sculptures create space for reckoning, recognition, and transformation, challenging the inequities and expectations imposed on women.

A storyteller at heart, Sellery brings a sharp, satirical awareness to the social ills and contradictions of contemporary life. Her irreverent approach incorporates a wide range of materials – metal, bone, fabric, cigarette butts, rose petals, and photography – chosen specifically to serve each concept. The result is a body of work that is humorous, thought provoking, and at times unsettling, often moving viewers to reflection, laughter, or tears.

Raised in Venice, California, Sellery now lives and works in the mountains of Santa Cruz. Her creative path includes years in the ceramics industry, woodworking and jewelry, experiences that continue to inform her tactile, materially driven practice. She has also played a significant role in the local arts community, serving as Program Coordinator at the Cabrillo Gallery and as a driving force behind FashionArt Santa Cruz, later co-founding Pivot: The Art of Fashion. Rose is currently co-owner and curator at MK Contemporary Art in downtown Santa Cruz and the founder of the Ripple Effect Arts Festival.

About the Artist:

My work begins with contradiction. I am drawn to the space where beauty and brutality coexist, where fragility becomes a form of strength, and where humor can carry the weight of difficult truths. Through sculpture, conceptual garments, and photography, I explore the complexities of our lives – how we are shaped, constrained, celebrated, and, at times, erased.

I use everyday objects and materials as a visual language – glass, fabric, metal, bone, found objects – transforming them into narratives that hold both personal and collective memory. These materials are never neutral; they carry histories, expectations, and cultural weight. By altering or recontextualizing them, I expose the tension between innocence and experience, adornment and restriction, protection and harm.

Humor and irony are essential tools in my process. They create an entry point, disarming the viewer just enough to engage with subjects that can be uncomfortable or confrontational. Beneath that surface, my work addresses issues of gender bias, societal pressure, resilience, and survival. I am interested in the stories we inherit, the roles we are asked to perform, and the quiet or radical ways we resist them.

I think of each piece as a kind of evidence – of endurance, of contradiction, of transformation. The objects I create are not static; they hold emotional residue and invite interpretation. They ask the viewer to reckon with what is seen and what is implied, to recognize themselves or others within the work.

Ultimately, my practice is about holding space: for vulnerability and power, for grief and humor, for anger and tenderness. It is an ongoing act of witnessing and reimagining—an attempt to make visible what is often overlooked, and to honor the complexity of lived experience.
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