"You Are Spring," Karen Seapker
If you wanted to know how the past few years have affected artists in Nashville, you could do no better than checking out Karen Seapker’s latest solo show, Green’s Your Color, at Zeitgeist through June 24. For starters, the exhibition title is a reference to the Gwendolyn Brooks poem “To the Young Who Want to Die.” Death will wait, she writes. Stay here.
The gun will wait. The lake will wait.
The tall gall in the small seductive vial
will wait will wait:
That’s the place where Seapker’s newest work — a collection of 15 impressive canvases — comes from. This is not just a fantasy land of natural wonders; it’s a fantasy land of natural wonders that have sprouted out of tragedy and deep grieving. In her artist’s statement, Seapker reflects on the purpose of darkness in cycles of growth. “I have been thinking about the role of dormancy in the life of seeds,” she writes, “how they need a kind of suspended sleep to grow. Darkness can be restorative. Punctuating life as it does, it serves a purpose.”
Seapker’s last solo show was installed days after her studio was destroyed in the March 2020 tornado. The paintings were pulled from the wreckage of the storm by friends and employees of a nearby Mexican restaurant, luckily unscathed. But we all know what happened next. Seapker’s paintings compress all that information — storms, the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement and protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder — merging the sacred and the garden in an attempt to find a way to grow.
Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.
I assure you death will wait. Death has
a lot of time.
"Protest, (After Iris)," Karen Seapker
On the wall to the left of the gallery’s entrance is the 72-by-48-inch “You Are Spring,” the grandest painting in the show. It takes elements of symmetrical stained glass and Gothic cathedral windows, and pairs them with simple iconography — tendrils of leaves, a spider in its web and a symbol that, depending on your perspective, looks like praying hands, a high five or a vulva. Here, Seapker’s colors are strong but gentle — like an intense sunset diffused by clouds or a summer rainstorm. There are more shades than there are words to name them, and yet Seapker masterfully synthesizes them into easy harmony. Light emanates from the paint as if Rothko were painting O’Keeffe. There is something inherently hopeful in relishing this kind of beauty.
Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.
A trio of paintings at first seems like outliers among the large-scale visions of gardens and skies. These works incorporate text, and were inspired by Seapker’s children. In recent years, her daughter has come with Seapker to protests and rallies, and thinks hard about what kinds of messages she wants to share with the world. “Lately,” Seapker writes, “she has been writing these messages in notes and books that she gives to me. Some of these are too beautiful to not reflect back to her, too rich to not paint so that I may reflect on the pride and sadness they bring to me.”
“Protest (After Iris)” demands its readers to “Feel the Love of Nature” — a phrase that works like shorthand for the Gwendolyn Brooks poem. Seapker copies her child’s handwriting, surrounding the sign with a clear pink-and-blue sky and a swirl of brushstrokes that could be the path of a storm, a clock’s hand, a planet’s orbit.
Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.
