TO THE YOUNG

THE MYTH AND THE MAN

Karen Seapker is making paintings about gardens, pride and sadness

BY LAURA HUTSON HUNTER

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

Half Noise

A solo exhibit from Sai Clayton explores the dual nature of biracialism

BY LAURA HUTSON HUNTER

HĀFU is Sai Clayton’s first solo exhibition, and it takes over the intimate West Nashville gallery space Random Sample with a singular point of view. The exhibition’s title references the Japanese word for “half,” which is used to identify people who are, like Clayton, ethnically half-Japanese. It’s a captivating concept that digs into the dual nature of biracialism, and the liminal space of an identity that’s never just one thing.

The show centers on self-portraiture of various kinds — paintings, embroidered silk, block prints, and even a book screen-printed by Nashville’s own Grand Palace. In the painted self-portraits, Clayton dilutes oil paint to such an extent that the pieces

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.

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.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM become like watercolor washes. Her monochromatic palette signals that these are more studies than fully realized works in themselves. Clayton washed and dried the raw canvas before she began each painting, emphasizing the textural quality of the surfaces and, possibly, easing up the process of creation — like the writer’s trick of scribbling across a blank page to get through a creative block. Here, Clayton is murdering her darlings, focusing on communicating a message without getting too precious about any of it. The faces in the paintings are all Clayton’s own, but each appears distinct due to odd angles or sharp shading — her nose casts a dark shadow across her face in one, her tucked chin and upward gaze give her a Kubrick stare in another. The dissimilarities are intentional, referencing both racial dysmorphia and, according to her artist’s statement, “the multitudes of self as it relates to outward racial perception and inward cultural identification.”

13-by-10-inch works are hung as a triptych, with Clayton’s painted self-portraits layered underneath block prints of masks with exaggerated features, like the ones used in Japanese kabuki theater. On the opposite wall of the gallery are three 48-by-34-inch canvases with painted faces, but instead of being covered with masks, these have embroidered pieces of silk hanging down their middles, bisecting each of them. The silk hangs from thin steel wires that are installed just above the self-portraits, and I’m reminded of everything from shop signage to church banners to protest signs.

Clayton is great at deconstructing an idea that is both specific to her personal experience and universally relatable. In “Face With Mask 1, 2 and 3,” three

In the corner of the gallery is a flowy black silk kimono jacket hanging from a wooden rod. The work, “American American American,” is covered in the Japanese word for “American” embroidered over and over, like a compulsive behavior (“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”) or a punitive task (Bart Simpson at the chalkboard). The stitches are tight across one half of the jacket, but around the edges of the left side, the words become more spaced out, drifting apart and eventually disappearing completely — as if the embroiderer gave up, exasperated, halfway through. EMAIL

Bad Acting, Othrside (9pm)

The Tuten Brothers w/ Colton Venner (7pm)