States of Matter
Quick: What’s the opposite of Donald Trump? A good person? A good woman, perhaps? How about a witch?
“The antidote to this capitalist era of Trump is witchcraft,” artist Karen Seapker told me during the recent opening of Sentinels and States of Matter at Zeitgeist Gallery. Sentinels is an exhibition of Seapker’s new paintings, and States of Matter is an all-female sculpture show that she co-curated with artist Vadis Turner. In a conversation with both curators a few days after States of Matter’s opening, Seapker tells me about the exhibit’s genesis with a blend of wit and sincerity that’s fairly typical of the Nashville-based painter.
“I had a daughter, and I was pregnant with another one, so the 2016 election was a tough pill to swallow,” says Seapker. “One of the things I felt most empowered by was the Women’s March, and in that kind of female-grounded activity. … I love the idea of bringing women together and trying to facilitate power. As we were developing the show, Vadie and I would say, ‘We’re assembling our coven.’ ”
And they relied on female-owned businesses to make States of Matter happen. “The work is heavy,” says Turner, “both conceptually and physically.” Seapker and Turner are the only exhibiting artists with Nashville studios, and the gallery didn’t have the budget to ship everyone else’s work back and forth from New York. So the pair asked female-owned Nashville businesses — including Arcade, The Callaway, Clary Collection, January Moon, New Hat and POP — if they’d help sponsor the show to cover the cost of shipping the work, and they all agreed.
They had just expanded their coven.
Sentinels
States of Matter’s artists don’t avoid the subject of femininity, but rather embrace and expand its definition.
“We want to indulge in it,” Turner says of working with the idea of femininity, and Seapker echoes that thought: “We want to nestle inside of it and stretch it out.”
On a wall at the darkened back of gallery, New York-based artist Allison Schulnik’s video piece “Eager” plays on a loop. It’s an eight-minute hypnotic claymation film that’s both substantial and really fun to watch — a rare bird in the world of video art. It’s also an interesting choice for a show tied to sculpture, but the work — that includes segments in which clay models morph into the dirt, then into a flower, then into a vagina — is the perfect anchor for a show centered on the various states of matter and the female form.
Turner’s own work, “Artifacts,” is included in the exhibit — a resin-cured puddle made from her own breast milk and charred sticks she gathered from the yard outside her family home. There’s an emphasis here on various states of matter (solid, liquid, gas and plasma) that’s made especially evident by its proximity to Lava Thomas’ “Lung Breasts.” “Lung Breasts” features four identical ceramic pieces mounted to the gallery wall that resemble both breasts (bodily vessels for liquid) and lungs (bodily vessels for gas). The matte-black pieces point to the idea of a woman aging and changing shape after motherhood. There’s a lot there, and all those possible interpretations give the space a sanctity of being instructed by women, regardless of whether they’re physically present.
Shari Mendelson’s “Four Vessels With Exoskeleton (Pink and Gold)” is on a pedestal in the middle of the gallery, its spindly, handmade form and iridescence complementing the clay figures in Schulnik’s “Eager” video. The work is modeled after an ancient Roman vessel, but made from Gatorade bottles — they give themselves away with their expiration dates, visible on the sculpture’s side — and hot glue. Again, there’s the idea of matter in both solid and liquid states, and the revulsion of bringing what’s basically garbage into an art gallery.
Similarly, Amy Brener’s shimmering suspended work “Flexi-Shield” is mermaid-tail beautiful until you notice the used Band-Aid and plastic shrimp forks that are mixed in with the flower petals floating inside it.
“If it were all pristine — if it were all flower petals — it would be boring,” Seapker says of the aesthetic she appreciates in Brener’s work.
Seapker’s own paintings act like support beams holding the States of Matter exhibition aloft. It makes sense that her large canvases are monumental — large pieces that are woven in between sculptures. But they don’t depend on the other exhibition for their weight. “Mountain Mother (For Kollwitz)” powerfully alludes to the Pietà — that is, the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of Jesus. The mother’s hand is just a few brushstrokes, but almost psychedelically large, as if outside of time and space, holding a body against a spiraling background that has a geometric design akin to a church’s stained-glass window. The painting next to it, “Sybil,” shows a sibyl — a mythical female oracle — with her skirt hiked up to expose the Nikes she’s wearing. It’s important to Seapker that no matter how epic and grandiose her subjects are, these sentinels are grounded in the contemporary world. That makes them approachable, as does their dynamic palette of various purples, hot pinks and baby blues.
The 10 paintings in Sentinels evolved from Seapker’s new perspective as a mother of two — her daughter Iris was born during the Trump administration, and in their first days together they witnessed a drive-by shooting on their way home from the hospital.
“It left me feeling like I needed to be on guard, constantly standing by the window,” she says. “So I really wanted to make these large female forms that I almost felt like I was making a temple in my studio.
“Yes, they’re nurturing, but they’re also powerful. And they can wreak havoc.”
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