Nature’s Core
by Photographer Bela Selendy
September 24.-November 20.

“We are wired to seek life. Hope is an evolutionary necessity.”

In this diverse presentation, photographer Bela Selendy explores themes of nature, life, transition, death, perception, time and reality. Moving from the figurative to the abstract, organic to material, the disparate but connected themes of the exhibit combine to express and explore zest and melancholy, optimism and despair, the slow movement of time and the capture of a frenetic instant.

In bursts of fractal color or tones of earth and rust, Selendy strives to capture the hunger for life in nature’s minute forms, the core striving for continued existence; moves to painterly explorations of the transition to decay, where both sadness and joy are to be found; and finally opens gateways to the imagination in abstract compositions built on man-made elements where nature inescapably emerges in involuntary perception. We are wired to seek life.

Bela Selendy is a native of Cornwall who nevertheless spent most of his life elsewhere. Educated at the Hotchkiss School, he continued to the University of Chicago where he studied philosophy, art, sciences, philosophy of art and philosophy of science before moving to Sweden for a few decades and engaging in a number of largely unrelated pursuits, finally returning permanently to Cornwall in 2020, well-timed to peak pandemic.

He worked for many years to gain sufficient control of the medium of photography that he could relinquish control and allow randomness, the absence of certainty that underpins what our perception fools us into interpreting as objective reality, to emerge.

The Souterrain Gallery of The Wish House
413 Sharon Goshen Tnpk
West Cornwall CT 06796
http://www.souterraingallery.net