In Karen Seapker’s 'Green’s Your Color' at Zeitgeist Gallery, the art is especially personal

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.

So begins Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “To the Young Who Want to Die.” For those who are despairing and struggling to continue another day, the poem is a prayerful plea to wait, take a breath, and remember that you have something to give to this world, no matter who you are.

It ends with the uplifting phrase: Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.

That last line rang in Karen Seapker’s ears while making “Green’s Your Color,” the Nashville-based artist’s fourth solo exhibition at Zeitgeist Gallery, on view through June 24. She said the show came to fruition during a particularly difficult time personally and in the greater Nashville community. Brook’s words buoyed her, which inspired her to pay it forward.

“At first, I was applying her words to my own life. But as the body of work grew, and as things happened around me, like the Covenant shooting and the anti-LGBTQ+ laws passed by the Tennessee legislature, which directly impacts my family, I wanted to say green’s your color, you are spring into the ears of everyone, especially those who were being harmed or dehumanized. I wanted to encourage their livelihoods and uplift them.”

Most of the show’s 15 oil paintings depict a twilight-hued otherworld populated by plants, wildlife and strange, abstracted figures who are often busy dropping seeds into the dirt. The terrestrial and the celestial realms appear equally prominent in this imaginary world, though one is given playful visual hints – a tube of lipstick, a pitchfork or a bandage – that it is not so alien from our own. Other works capture phrases her 6-year-old daughter scrawled onto protest signs: “You Are Muthr Nachr” and “We Are the World The end.” They speak to the interplay between Seapker’s personal life and her community. They also show how the disarming wisdom of a child can cut through all the noise.

Seapker’s previous solo show at Zeitgeist opened just days after the March 2020 tornado that ripped through Nashville and destroyed her studio space. Her paintings miraculously survived, and she has since had a new studio built onto her home. Now, she can see her garden from her studio windows and her family is nearby when she paints. The closeness of her garden and family is “completely responsible for this body of work,” she said. With titles like “Be the Seed,” “Kin,” “Slow Sow” and “Garden Buddy,” it’s easy to see their influence.

One of the major questions this body of work asks is, “How do we, personally and collectively, move forward from struggle?”

Seapker said her garden supplied a lot of the answers.

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“The garden is such a teacher. It is a constant reminder of how we exist in a larger context of beings, an ecosystem, where all these different parts matter to the larger community, whether we see them, know them or they are unknowable.”

We don’t get through struggle alone, in other words. We do it together, collaboratively.

To put this idea into action, Seapker incorporated a seed and flower bouquet exchange into the exhibition. Anyone is free to bring seeds or flowers from their garden and trade them for ones left by others. The idea is to bring the garden into the show in a physical way. It’s also meant to foster a sense of fellowship and reciprocity.

But Seapker understands that getting through hard times requires more than just community. It also requires honest reflection.

“Reflecting on all the points of contention in our society now is so necessary," she said. "Only then can we set intentions for a path forward.”

Beautiful lunar-esque imagery pervades “Green’s Your Color.” It points to the night sky’s association with introspection, wisdom and cycles of growth.

“I love the idea that the moon comes to us nightly and offers itself to us in the darkness as this point of reflection,” she said.

Her artist statement delves further into this idea, comparing dark respiration, an important physiological process in plants that requires the absence of light, to our own ability to “recover hope, courage and strength.” She writes, “Darkness can be restorative; … it serves a purpose.”

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As for her strange, abstracted figures, Seapker hopes they inspire viewers to lean into the sensual.

“There’s something very centering about a figure with its hands in the earth. It brings us into our bodies and helps direct and slow down our attention.”

We are all “creaturely,” she added. “We are all of this earth and connected.”

She hopes the show also inspires viewers to “stay with the strange.”

“I have come to really appreciate the alien in my work, and I feel that maybe that’s the role of art – to foster experiences with the strange and the unknown so that we can sit in wonder and not have to belabor things with judgment.”

If you go

What: “Green’s Your Color”

When: Through June 24

Where: 516 Hagan St., Suite 100

Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Thursday-Saturday; by appointment

Other: On June 17, Zeitgeist Gallery will host an artist talk and garden show-and-tell with Karen Seapker and special guest Rudy Dillon, owner of Garden Buddy. Attendees are encouraged to bring something related to their garden – a plant, a tool or perhaps a picture of a memorable garden event – to show the group.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Karen Seapker's 'Green’s Your Color' solo exhibit at Zeitgeist Gallery