Artist Vadis Turner’s Nashville Home Is a Surrealist Fever Dream

It’s been a decade since Todd Selby published his last book. The photographer’s self-described “artful snooping” placed him firmly in the vanguard of the early aughts blogging scene, documenting compelling personalities in their colorful spaces for his online journal. But what began as a personal project rapidly escalated into a lucrative career, with his debut book—The Selby Is In Your Place—releasing in 2010. (The first printing of 12,000 copies sold out within the first month.) Since then, he’s introduced two additional books, one on fashion, the other on food, and now, his fourth arrives on April 16: The Selby Comes Home.

“It’s like a coming home for myself in a sense,” he says to Vogue, noting that he now shares two children—Ella and Simone—with his wife, Danielle Sherman, whom he married in 2015. The focus of this new book comes from two or so years of traveling around the world photographing subjects in their homes, but with a very riotous addition to the frame: children.

“Having kids reorients your entire viewpoint. When kids enter the picture, it’s an interesting thing from an interior perspective and I wanted to explore how children impact the creative’s home,” he says. Before this project, it wasn’t necessarily within his purview as a photographer. “In the beginning, I would avoid them at all costs because kids equal chaos; it was so challenging to work with them because they’re so unpredictable.” But now that he’s a parent and continues to evolve as an artist, his lens is refocusing. “I decided I was going to embrace the weirdness of the moment and the chaos and the creativity, and kids definitely bring that in heaps.”

The Selby Comes Home transports readers into the wild and wonderful homes of 41 families around the globe, from Brooklyn to Bora Bora, and includes playful interactive details like mazes, crossword puzzles, and color-by-number pages to be enjoyed by readers both young and young at heart. One such shoot took place in Nashville at the eccentric residence of artist Vadis Turner, her husband Clay Ezell, and their sons Gray and Vreeland, whom Selby met through a mutual friend and “New York legend,” Libby Callaway (who has since moved back to Nashville). “The way Vadis relates to her interiors is almost like she’s adopting these art objects into her home,” he says. “I think she has the same kind of attraction to objects and furniture and stories as I do, so yeah, it was love at first meet with her and her family and their space.”

Turner had been living in Brooklyn for 15 years before deciding with her husband to move back to Nashville (where they are both originally from). “As Brooklyn started to percolate from around 2000 to 2014, it seemed very Southern to me and Clay with the beards and the bourbon and the reclaimed wood and all that,” she says. Simultaneously, Nashville was shapeshifting as a city, too. “There was a new Nashville that was starting to develop with a lot of expats from Los Angeles and New York City and we wanted to come back to reconnect with our families and also to be part of this new artistic culture that was blooming in Nashville.”

So, she got in the habit of Googling ‘building for sale in downtown Nashville’ in the wee hours of the morning, and eventually came across a Second Empire-style home built in the late 1800s, which they ultimately bought and renovated. The interiors are a visual feast: an explosion of color, texture, shape, and objects that resemble something plucked from a surrealist fever dream. “All of the art is stuff I’ve traded with artist friends,” Turner says, adding that her approach to flea markets and antique malls is rooted in emotion. “I can’t go in with an agenda like ‘I need a zebra leg lamp’ but I see what I respond to and observe if I’m still thinking about it 15 minutes later.” There’s no litmus test for whether or not she’ll respond to an object, per se, but there are also no limits. “If I see something that’s too ugly for anyone else to love at the antique mall, it’s probably going home with me because if I don’t take it, who will? What kind of future will this ugly thing have?”

She talks a lot about the fine line between ugly and fabulous, relating it to her studio work. “I like things that have multiple identities that you don’t necessarily know what to do with; that don’t just file away as that’s the right couch or that’s a cool coffee table, but things you’re like wow, who in the world would put this with this?” She offers the example of her living room, which is decorated with chintzy couches beside a faux stone coffee table from the ’80s. “Maybe this relationship wasn’t intended to exist, but I feel like you see things and yourself more clearly in relation to things that they are different from. If everything’s the same and everything is talking together in a predictable way, there’s not much to glean. You see through contrast.”

Turner makes it a point that there are no rooms their kids don’t inhabit and play around in. “Visually it’s pretty wild, but our home is filled with things that remind us of places we’ve been or people we’ve crossed paths with, and I love that to them it’s not weird it’s just their normal.” Some of the artist trade pieces that highlight this narrative are two light fixtures suspended above the dining table, made out of paper plates. “They were designed by a friend of mine, Christopher Trujillo, who I met because we had a studio in the same building in New York in the early 2000s.” They hadn’t connected in nearly a decade, but when Turner was on the hunt for lighting for the dining room, she had an idea. “He came down and we spent the weekend together and he made these two paper plate chandeliers in reference to my two sons.”

On top of the artist trade pieces and kooky assemblage of items discovered at flea markets and antique malls, there are also two commissions in their home: wall art by Kelly Diehl and Elizabeth Williams and a floor painting by Brett Douglas Hunter. “I had this hallway that needed something and I was looking for cool vintage runners and realized I was barking up the wrong tree.” She was doing the expected thing. “I was looking for the object that’s supposed to go there, and I’m not into ‘supposed to’ so much. As an artist with my practice, I’m strong-arming materials to do what they’re not supposed to do, and I think that speaks a lot to how I designed this home.” And with that, she relinquished the idea that a hallway needs a runner altogether. “I asked Brett to make a floor painting and now we get to walk all over this fabulous painting every day.”

Though no color palette or prescriptive theme reigns over the home, one cohesive element is present throughout: plants. “The plant collecting became the plant problem during the pandemic,” Turner laughs. In addition to the sea of lush vegetation draped and perched throughout all of the rooms, the family also has a rooftop deck, which is the designated potting area. “The first couple of special plants I bought were on the days my sons said their own names for the first time. The idea is to try and keep these plants alive so I can send my sons off to college with them.” She especially loves plants with black leaves and carnivorous plants, like Nepenthes. “I’m very proud to say that my Nepenthes actually won most unusual plant in the Tennessee State Fair.” She was awarded a blue ribbon.

Vadis Turner’s work will be in a group show at the Museum of Arts & Design in New York City, opening June 1.