Selina Trepp: The Tide Always Turns, 2024

For more than a decade, Selina Trepp has “worked with what she has,” relying on the existing contents of her studio to drive both process and outcome in colorful stop motion animations, photography, sculptures and, more recently, paintings. Yet the artist’s interests far transcend the studio–she recently said “I look around the world and see faces everywhere.” Such faces, lit by the artificial lights of night clubs and music venues, have populated recent paintings and works on paper.

In this vein, The Tide Always Turns, Trepp’s first etching, pictures female subjects revealed only in part among inchoate shapes, sidewinding strokes, and pale washes of color. The women, self-contained, do not perform for anyone’s gaze but rather for themselves. The title suggests greater social-political contexts shaped by ebbs and flows of power. 

Produced over several months in the studio, Trepp experimented with marks and abstract gestures from which these forms and figures emerged over time. She first utilized the “sugar lift” process to make marks, using India ink and brushes. While these materials are part of the artist’s sketchbook practice, drawing for an etching was a process of discovery. Only after gradually building up marks and tonal range, Trepp added selective line work, developed a second plate using a mix of techniques, and began a process of altering the image–in some cases erasing entire figures–resulting in the two plate eight color print. 

Trepp’s paintings and sculptures often hold kinetic or moveable properties that she brings to life in stop motion animations. The artist has made an animation to accompany this work, using nineteen state proofs from the production of the etching. However, even in its final print form The Tide Always Turns illustrates the nature of etchings themselves inherently time-based, not unlike an animation: one only need follow the composition’s subtle contours and iterations to trace their formation over six months and nineteen transmutations. 

Trepp’s animations have recently been installed in public projects at O’Hare Airport’s International Arrivals Terminal, in San Francisco’s newly built 49 south Van Ness building lobby, which houses the city's departments of public works, in Chicago’s 150 Riverside Plaza Lobby, the facade at the Merchandise Mart, and the 21C Museum Hotel in Chicago.