The last time Karen Seapker exhibited her paintings at East Nashville gallery Red Arrow was in 2024, in a two-person show with ceramicist Linda Lopez. Titled Turn, Turn, Turn, the exhibition nodded to the Pete Seeger song, famously covered by The Byrds, with its refrain: “To everything there is a season.” With Time After Time, Seapker returns to a seasonally inflected song reference — this time invoking Cyndi Lauper’s classic — and continues her meditation on the cycles of life. In the exhibition essay, Seapker cites Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time: “So many of our most ecologically deleterious behaviours are to do with refusing impermanence and decay, insisting on summer all the time,” Laing writes. “The garden was always engaged in a dance with death.” The reference underscores Seapker’s commitment to situating her painting within contemporary conversations. Even as she depicts elegantly stylized figures shielding candles from an unseen wind, the work remains conceptually rigorous, using symbolism to engage with urgent ecological and cultural concerns. The exhibition coincides with the Frist Art Museum’s expansive In Her Place: Nashville Artists in the Twenty-First Century exhibition, opening Jan. 29, which features several of Seapker’s paintings. Together the two shows offer a rare opportunity to encounter the work of one of the city’s most significant painters across multiple contexts at once.
Through Feb. 28 at Red Arrow
919 Gallatin Ave.
