LONDON.- There is a place on earth that can be seen from space like a white splash across the darker skin of the surrounding land. The albino mark looks like something that has been forgotten. There is no green of tree cover. There is no blue of water. There is no brown of soil. It is emptiness. This is the Makgadikgadi Salt Pan, a vast area in the heart of the Kalahari Desert of Botswana. Chloe Sells has been photographing there for the last two years. In her new body of work, Measuring Infinity, Sells interprets the sublime and mysterious nature of this area.

These contemplative images consider the finite and the infinite. The horizon line, which scores the center of the photographs, is at once recognition of what is fixed and determinate while simultaneously portraying a feeling of what is deeply abiding. If one were to chase the horizon around the earth’s circumference they would one day end up in the very same place they stand in this moment. An awareness of the cycle of life and death and how it is affected by time is embedded in this stark demarcation.

There is play between the immutable and the supple and Sells embroiders them through her process. To create her images she uses a large format camera and prints in a darkroom. Her process incorporates alchemic experimentation. Each outcome is unique. Beyond her darkroom interventions, Sells has drawn or painted on each of the works in Measuring Infinity. Through her mark making she works to describe the underlying affinity and resonance she feels in the place. As Sells works the story of the Makgadikgadi changes like a kaleidoscope with each telling.

Chloe Sells (b.1976) divides her time between her home in Botswana, Africa, where she photographs with a large format camera, and London, England, where she processes and prints her work. Each of her prints is the result of her in-depth manipulation of the printing process in the darkroom, at once physical, spontaneous and deliberate. She employs experimental and spontaneous methods such as screens, overlays, open-weave fabrics and movements of the paper, expertly combined to create her unique, bold and dreamy photographs. The layering of image, colour, and texture in the chromogenic prints creates a dreamy effect, transporting the viewer into unknown realms. Informed by extensive travel, residence and immersion in countries foreign to her, Sells explores the question of how places are defined, while speculating on the consequences of human experience of place.

Using the stylized and archetypal format of the still life, the objects within her earlier work are symbolic surrogates, coordinates embedded with notations of exploration and movement. Relics of archaic civilizations, organic matter in varying states of decay, elements of the quotidian, the utilitarian, the exotic and the occult constitute the carefully- constructed totems. Without conferring a specific history, the objects summoned together within each image create rather than re-create narratives. Sells' arrangements become less a document of an actual place, and more an allegory of her relationships to those places. In more recent landscape work, remnants of a childhood in the Colorado Mountains and extensive travels in adulthood have imbued Sells' work with a reverence for the sublime beauty of nature. We can see it translated to the viewer as she imbues a colorful and emotional interpretation of each environment. She says her photographs interpret place as a memory or as an evocation of a feeling "I can smell them and I can feel them. Feel the air, feel the light." Her works are undeniably painterly and immediate, pushing the boundaries of process within the photographic medium.

Sells attended the Rhode Island School of Design, from which she graduated in 2000 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography. She received her Masters in Fine Art from Central St. Martins in September 2011. Over the last 12 years she has lived and photographed on three continents, Asia, North America and Africa, which has been integral to her artwork. Chloe uses a Contax 645 and Linhof 4x5 to create her pictures. Each of Sells' works is a unique analogue C-type print, made by hand in the darkroom.