She is no longer just Selah Marley. She is Selah—period, full stop, breath held. Born into a legacy so loud it echoes in the walls of culture itself, Selah has done the improbable: quieted it. Not by disowning it, but by metabolizing it—converting the raw materials of notoriety, expectation, and inheritance into something more elusive and electric.

“I think I can be passive,” the artist, singer, and model says, eyes flickering with honesty and something like suspicion. “I like to observe. I don’t like to act unless I feel qualified to act.”

Selah modeled for Calvin Klein, Ivy Park, Chanel, and others through her teens and early twenties. Now, she has expanded into art installations (which she calls “desserts”) that make meaning out of a thousand contradictions. “I love a little moral ambiguity,” she grins. “A little complexity. I like human flaw.”

Crashed into by the adoration of strangers, navigating the very forces that facilitated the mechanics of her family’s relationship to fame, Selah downloads from every place she’s been: backstages and bedrooms, essays and estuaries, churches and clubs, the long legacy of her mother’s principles and her grandfather Bob Marley’s militancy.

Selah grew up homeschooled, then went to private school, then public. “There’s something Hannah Montana about it,” she jokes, not trying to telegraph relatability, but to trace the winding topography of her becoming. “Miley Cyrus goes to high school and at nighttime she’s Hannah Montana. Same thing.” It’s one of the few metaphors that feels light enough to hold the double-consciousness she carries: the pressure of legacy, the demand for individuality, the irreconcilable pull of being both known and unknowable.

Today, Selah lives in New Jersey with her maternal grandparents, though she was out and about in the New York City art scene through COVID. The pandemic was a turning point in her artistic process. “It was intense…just existing under that level of intensity and regulation.” If that era represented a tightening, Selah’s current chapter feels like an unspooling. She prefers to create large-scale, multi-stage installation pieces which take many months or years between development, sprawling like a mycelium network—each idea feeding the next, rooted in history but glowing with future-thought.

The future she’s planning for is one dreamt in poetics and built from scraps. “It depends on what comes to pass, honestly,” she says. Selah seems keenly aware that art will outlive the conditions of its making, but the contemporary state of the world is almost too glaringly difficult for her to speak about. “Do we need to talk about eggs?” she asks, half-laughing, half-dead serious.

These are extreme times, she acknowledges. She, like many of us, is finding home in the quiet absurdities of our economic and emotional moment, where the price of breakfast can feel like a symbol of collapse, where basic needs have become coded into class commentary and where art can no longer afford to be neutral. “America is like a house,” she offers. “Black people have a bedroom. White people have a bedroom. Asian people have a bedroom. Hispanic [and Latinx] people have a bedroom. And then there’s like the bunk bed of Black women, the bunk bed of the queer community.”

Selah thinks often about the commercial narrative she’s been a part of as a model. She carries some suspicion of the purposes and practices of advertising, and as an artist, is intentional about her own work not becoming fodder for continued algorithmic numbness. She is in the practice of visual essays and moral puzzles.

As demonstrated in her 2019 installation piece, “The Primordial Place,” Selah’s presence feels stitched from the scraps of a post-revolutionary wardrobe—vintage textures, spiritual signifiers, the aura of someone who believes that the spiritual is political, and the political must be felt in the flesh. Her aesthetic sensibility—layered, ceremonial, often handmade—comes from both her lineage and her longing. For Selah, clothes are iconography. Her body is the altar.

Selah does not just want to be a muse, however. She wants to be the mechanism. She shapeshifts through scenes—installations, sound design, concept films, an art practice built around the physical fact of her own body. “My body as form, as art itself,” is what she is broaching, in her own words.

Selah’s craft identification fluctuates, and she toys with the pillars of genre: “performance artist,” “installation artist,” or even “interdisciplinary.” What she’s doing—or rather, what she’s becoming—lives somewhere deeper, somewhere more fluid. She is, by her own identification, a concept artist. Not in the formalist sense, though she respects those traditions. But in the intuitive sense: a thinker of atmospheres, a feeler of forms.

Across mediums—filmic vignettes, sonic textures, spatial installation—Selah returns to one enduring tool: the body. It’s a mechanism she knows well, honed by years of modeling and public-facing work. But she’s quick to note that the body as image is not the same as the body as vessel. “Marley is still a part of it,” she says, nodding to the genealogy that shapes her physical presence. “My body as form, as art itself.”

How does one evolve their body—their literal form—when it has already been made into a symbol by the outside world? Selah is not currently interrogating herself with this question. At present she’s not even asking to be seen. She’s creating a language privately—one layered with contradiction, ritual, and resistance—so she can speak to herself first. A whisper into the world that says: here is my theory of everything.

If Selah is a symbol, she is one forged in ambiguity. She is not an answer. She is an aperture. Through her, we glimpse the complications of legacy, the strange distortions of fame, the beauty of self-curated myth.

Photographed by David Bellemere

Styled by Christopher Campbell

Written by Skylar Mitchell

Hair: Anne Sophie Begtrup using TK at Wise And Talented

Makeup: Thibaut Marieke using TK 

Production: Shape Production

Styling Assistant: Mia Hurley

Shot on Location In Ecouen, Fr.

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