Ask Now the Beasts

What Makes It Great? / Featured / April 9, 2025

By Suzanne Révy

For centuries, artists have grappled with questions of aging and mortality through still-life painting. Wilting flowers, rotting fruit, skulls and sacrificial animals are just a few of the items that frequently appear in the compositions of, say, Dutch and Spanish 17th century painting. Many of these works feature domestic ephemera, but at their heart, they are a paean to the transitory nature of life. Contemporary artist Tara Sellios employs Baroque light in fantastical still-lifes of desiccated insects and skeletons that she shapes into religious iconography or animal forms, pondering the same big questions in her solo exhibition Ask Now the Beasts, on view at the Fitchburg Art Museum in Massachusetts through January 18th, 2026.

“Vinea” by Tara Sellios, 2023, from the series Ask Now the Beasts, courtesy of the artist and the Fitchburg Art Museum.

“Vinnea (Detail)” by Tara Sellios, 2023, from the series Ask Now the Beasts, courtesy of the artist and the Fitchburg Art Museum.

“Ask now the beasts” is a passage found in the Bible’s Book of Job that suggests what the animals know: there is Godly wisdom in the complex systems of nature. Sellios’ intricate compositions mirror the complexities of the natural world; she arranges and sustains a delicate balance between a bounty of forms and the scarcity of flesh. By using the skeletal remains of insects, birds, dried twigs and fruit, fractal patterns emerge to form shapes such as a cross or scythe that underscore the cyclical nature of life, death and resurrection.

“Umbra” by Tara Sellios, 2024, from the series Ask Now the Beasts, courtesy of the artist and the Fitchburg Art Museum.

“Umbra (Detail)” by Tara Sellios, 2024, from the series Ask Now the Beasts, courtesy of the artist and the Fitchburg Art Museum.

“Dilucesco” by Tara Sellios, 2024, from the series Ask Now the Beasts, courtesy of the artist and the Fitchburg Art Museum.

“Dilucesco (Detail)” by Tara Sellios, 2024, from the series Ask Now the Beasts, courtesy of the artist and the Fitchburg Art Museum.

“Messis No. 2” by Tara Sellios, 2022, from the series Ask Now the Beasts courtesy of the artist and the Fitchburg Art Museum.

The masterful installation in the downstairs gallery is a cocoon-like sanctuary that allows visitors to contemplate the work in quiet reverie. Sellios explores the dualities between light and dark in two images of the cross, one made with a crowded throng of black insects, the other with bleached butterflies bursting outward. Two scythes installed on opposite sides of the gallery reveal the cyclical nature of the seasons through warm and cool palettes. A falling beast is juxtaposed with a rising one that might function as metaphors for wealth and poverty or joy and tragedy or for the vicissitudes between our fragile, physical essence and the inevitable afterlife.

“Ascendo” by Tara Sellios, 2023, from the series Ask Now the Beasts, courtesy of the artist and the Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg, MA.

“Subtero” by Tara Sellios, 2023, from the series Ask Now the Beasts, installation photograph by Suzanne Révy.

“Abyssus” by Tara Sellios, 2024, from the series Ask Now the Beasts, courtesy of the artist and the Fitchburg Art Museum.

Abyssus is a large composition of fish skeletons, shark jaws and crocodile bones that references how life began while also anticipating an apocalyptic end. We may not know what sparked the first inkling of cellular life, but scientific consensus suggests that it started deep in the ocean. Looser in composition than many of the others, Abyssus infuses its tumultuous flow with a sense of wonder and humor despite an undercurrent of dread. For example, while two nose-to-nose seahorses look like a loving couple, an eel is about to swallow a small fish and broken bones fall from a pair of jaws. A crocodile represents the Leviathan, a creature referenced in the Book of Job who brings chaos, but the picture teems with a kind of vibrant life.

“Abyssus (detail)” by Tara Sellios, 2024, from the series Ask Now the Beasts, courtesy of the artist and the Fitchburg Art Museum.

These large prints invite close inspection and are every bit as interesting by the square inch as they are by the square foot. It is a delight to discover such telling details as a mama bird feeding her hatchlings or the illusion of leaves that are really the wings of katydids and a cricket with an hour glass. A vitrine with several objects found in the pictures is placed in the gallery and preparatory sketches are installed in a vestibule upstairs offering an absorbing peak into Sellios’ creative process.

A fear of death has led many to seek comfort in a higher power through religion, and artists have created many visions of the transcendent and spiritual. Like her artistic forebears, Sellios enraptures viewers with the symbols and mysteries of earthly and heavenly delights.