Karen Seapker

“In the face of impermanence and death, it takes courage to love the things of this world and to believe that praising them is our noblest calling.”

—Joanna Macy

Plato is excited to present Down with the Ship, Karen Seapker’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.

Down with the Ship posits nature as a source of consolation, resilience, and vitality amid turbulent times. Inspired by Seapker’s backyard garden, her family, and artists and poets, including Rainer Maria Rilke, Derek Jarman, and Dolly Parton, the paintings seek connection and joy while making room for grief and anxiety about the future of our planet. Straddling the sacred and the playful, Seapker leans into the devotional in a moment of doubt.

Throughout the exhibition, abstracted figures move through shifting landscapes, engaging in acts of care. Dressed in a mix of ceremonial and everyday clothing, they save seeds, identify plants, climb trees, watch birds, and forage. These gestures take on a devotional quality, locating the sacred not in some distant ideal, but in the relationships we nurture with one another and the living world.

Across the paintings, skies swirl and grounds shift, evoking both a world marked by instability and the cycles of change that shape ecosystems and human experience. Banshees—figures from Celtic folklore traditionally associated with death—appear in several works, less as caricatures of terror than as companions signifying the distress that we learn to live with. According to Seapker, their presence reflects her engagement with environmentalist and author Joanna Macy’s call to “befriend our despair”: acknowledging our grief so that it may reveal our love for the planet and become a gateway for collective action.

The artist makes multiple sketches on paper before transferring her compositions to canvas in light oil sketches, which she continues to rework in response to the scale of each painting. Spirals, semicircles, and intersecting arcs register the movement of her body while suggesting perpetual motion. These forms evoke the way a garden repeatedly moves through phases of abundance and loss, repair and decay, grieving and healing. The exhibition took shape as the heat of summer softened into autumn, and Seapker’s paint handling embraced indicators of change. She utilizes transparency, shifting gradients, and passages of soft focus—often deriving from the photographs she draws from—to create forms that dissolve and transform.

Throughout the exhibition, acts of tending and paying attention become ways to remain connected to all that we hold dear. They are also, however, acts of stubborn defiance, a refusal of resignation. The artist refrains from offering a solution to the existential questions that inform her work. Rather, drawing on Rainer Maria Rilke’s invitation to “live the questions,” the paintings suggest that caring for the world does not require certainty about its future.

aren Seapker is a Nashville-based painter who explores physical, emotional, and intellectual connections through the use of bold color combinations, shifting lines, and disrupted spaces. She employs a dynamic, gestural style as well as observational techniques to create paintings alluding to the power of human relationships, our links to nature, and the passage of time.

Karen Seapker (b. 1982) received MFA from Hunter College in New York, NY and her BA in Studio Art and Art History from Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA. Her work has been exhibited at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA; Knoxville Museum of Art in Knoxville, TN; Frist Art Museum in Nashville, TN; Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, NH; Plato in New York, NY; James Cohan Gallery in New York, NY and Shanghai, China; Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, IL; Sargent's Daughters in Los Angeles, CA, and Red Arrow in Nashville, TN, among many others. Seapker’s work was included in Crystal Bridges Museum’s survey of contemporary art, State of the Art 2020.

Seapker’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, The Wall Street Journal, Hyperallergic, ArtNet, Artsy Editorial, and Burnaway. Her exhibitions have also been featured in New American Paintings (2022, 2015) and in catalogs for State of the Art 2020. Seapker has participated in multiple artist residencies, including at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN; ChaNorth, Pine Plains, NY; and Cedar Crest College, Allentown, PA