Meet Jd Sell | Artist & Arts professional

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jd Sell and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi JD, how has your background shaped the person you are today?
I grew up spending much of my time in Boulder, Longmont and Erie Colorado. My parents have since moved back to the Twin Cities area in Minnesota Where I was born and most of my family still lives. Moving West fro there as a kid had a major impact on me growing up. It taught me very quickly how to make connections and adapt quickly to my surroundings. I guess, thinking about it now, a lot of my art making practices to date still has rooting in this adaptability. I guess that’s not surprising I would say, just thinking about some of the installation works I’ve done over the years in some fairly unorthodox places Including; Bathrooms, alleyways, abandoned buildings and Vehicles.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I’ll try to answer a few of these without getting to side tracked lol.
To Start, my works, as of late, are inspired by how I relate and interact with corrupted, aged and decayed images, websites, and recordings found online and IRL. I feel so often unsatisfied with most of the content being made currently. That largely, I believe, has to do with how the rules have been set up for most major platforms and most things tend to follow the same template. Even thinking about how whoever might be reading this interview is more likely than not reading it from one of these platforms. I slip into doom scrolling often when I’m not checking in on myself. What I find exciting is I’m usually pulled out of “the doom scroll” by mistake in an act of chance. Some of my favorite moments are when the wifi drops and a video wont load so I’m left with the loading screen or a partially loaded image. Or sometimes a video has major compression artifacts that creates pixelated clusters in the frames. It breaks the rules of the templates and excites me every time they happen. Its feels otherworldly, like a glimpse behind the veil of reality into some dead language or forgotten dialogue. I know of a few other artists the are working on similar investigations. Frequently, I’m exploring feelings of isolation, loneliness and death in my work. My practice centers around collecting artifacts that hold these feelings for me. I set rules, like a system, for these artifacts to navigate through before being made into drawings, paintings, installations or performances. There almost like a personal rites of passages they must pass for me to feel as though they will stand on there own as a subject for a work. Each of these trials are very different for each artifact depending on my relation to it. However once each artifact passes this stage they all move through a process of what I guess i could call rapid decay, where I subject each artifact to a form of decay that distorts it in hopes that it might capture a moment of mistake or chance like other It took awhile for me to accept this part of my practice. It was hard for me to see how important collecting and connecting to these artifacts is to me. I’m curious about understanding my gravitation toward hyper intimate and phenomenological happenings just outside the peripherals of my every day.
I don’t know if my work really is set apart from others in my field, nor do I really want to be. I guess that doing something different for the sake of standing out has never been something i’ve really thought about for my work. I’m more interested in contributing to a larger dialogue of work being made currently. I like to think of it like a reddit page that the comments board is so long there’s no way to dig up the original post so everyone is consistently posing different questions that loosely surround the same topic.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I love the food and drink scene in the city. Almost all of my close loved ones work in the industry in some capacity. When I’m not working at the Museum or in the studio I’m out spending time with friends who are working at restaurants and Bars. When my closet friend from Austin visits, the first thing we always do is go around and have a meal or a drink with our friends. There is something so important about sharing a meal and a story with your loved ones. It’s how we get closer to one another.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Oh absolutely,
I feel we all receive encouragement in some form, supporting anything we choose to do. I wouldn’t be where I am without many people in my life who have assisted in helping me navigate my career. I’d like to specifically recognize Corey Drieth, Matt Barton and Valerie Brodart. These three were teachers in my undergraduate program and showed me so much of who I am and what I’m capable of achieving. I would also like to share my gratitude for my mentor and friend Senga Nengudi. She is a fierce support and encouragement in my career. I cannot thank her enough for all that she does, not only for me but, for all that are around her.

Website: https://www.jdsell.org

Instagram: @jdsell

Facebook: @jdsell

Image Credits
Madison (Maddy) Myers