Zeitgeist is pleased to announce Karen Seapker's third solo show at the gallery. Seapker continues using a dynamic, gestural style and vibrant palette to allude to the power of human relationships and the passage of time.

Karen Seapker received her MFA from Hunter College in New York, NY. She has exhibited her work internationally including exhibitions at James Cohan Gallery in NYC, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and is currently featured in State of the Art 2020, a major survey of contemporary American art at the Crystal Bridges Museum. She lives and works in Nashville, TN.

Artist Statement

Last Spring, we began a garden.  It included a circular path that I walked repeatedly, a humble backyard ritual.  The consistency was comforting, with the changes throughout the growing season bringing welcomed surprises.  I began to consider how walking that circular path felt like the physical practice of moving my body in time to the internal rhythms that my life had recently established.  

As a mother of small children, I am immersed in daily and seasonal rituals of family life, day after day, month after month... patterns, routines and traditions create their own rhythm.  And yet, I also live with the strange and simultaneous truth that consistency is a mirage.

Becoming a mother comes with constant reminders of ephemerality.  My body was a transitory container that my children passed through. Currently, they seek comfort, support and shelter from me, but one day will become independent.

Beyond my own family, we are raising our children at a time when our planet faces significant and irreparable environmental threats.  Predictability, consistency and the calm suggestion of a perfect circle does not suffice. With consideration to the ways that our family fits within the contexts of the greater world, the environment, the relentless attention economy, the current political climate, etc., there are swirling, churning, contrapuntal and dissonant rhythms at play.

Painting (like gardening, like parenting) requires the gentle balance between controlled action and attentive observation. Decisive action is essential but not without a sensitivity to where and when to actively submit, to make space for something or someone, or to move in a different direction.  The paintings in this show do not offer a solution or singular direction for navigating the tumult, but they provide what feels like a slow surrounding of something that I need to continually practice, and give myself over to, again and again.

“Balance is not a passive resting place—it takes work, balancing the giving and the taking, the raking out and the putting in.”

― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”

― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

dates:

March 7 - April 25, 2020

artist:

Karen Seapker