Karen Seapker (b. 1982, Pittsburgh, PA) is a painter who navigates physical, emotional, and intellectual connections through use of bold color combinations, historical references, shifting lines, and disrupted spaces. She uses both a dynamic, gestural style as well as observational techniques to create paintings and works on paper depicting imagery that alludes to the power of human relationships, our connections to nature, and the passage of time. She received her MFA from Hunter College in New York, NY. Her work has been exhibited in spaces including the James Cohan Gallery in NYC and Shanghai, The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA, Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, and Sargent's Daughters in Los Angeles. Seapker was included in Crystal Bridges Museum's survey of contemporary art, State of the Art 2020. Her work is in various private collections as well as the collection of Chrystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Reviews of her work have been in publications including Burnaway, Hyperallergic, and ArtForum. She lives and works in Nashville, TN.

"I'm trying to remember if I ever was a night owl. I'm certain now that I prefer a long, early morning before the rest of the world starts stirring. I enjoy waking up well before my children to take advantage of the quiet. On an early morning like this, lusciously silent and still dark as night, I was in my studio thinking, when a bird suddenly began singing vigorously outside of my window. Other birds called back. Within moments I was surrounded by birdsong in the seeming night. I was so struck by the strangeness and then I realized the sun was getting ready to rise. A dawn chorus.

The dissonance of singing in the dark has stayed with me while I've made these paintings. In so many ways lately, I have found myself confronted with different darknesses, withholding visibility for what is to come. Personally, politically, environmentally, globally – so many things hang in the balance and yet each day the sun rises and we move through our days despite the looming unknowns. And I've been thinking, what does it mean to sing amid uncertainty?

My garden is a teacher – a cyclical space that moves with a natural breath of abundance and loss, repair and decay, providing a practice in grieving and healing. Lately, I've been observing the simultaneity of these polarities, overlapping and in communication with one another. Things moving through various stages of visibility with death ever-present in life and among the dead – an entanglement – the word the writer Ross Gay uses to describe "our belonging to one another". 

The other thing about the birds is that they weren't just singing out into the darkness. They were calling out to one another. A full and proliferating call and response. Making a garden can be like this. I used to think I was making the garden for myself but over time, as I've observed the life that the garden has called back to itself, I find myself planting for Swallowtails and Goldfinches and Eastern bluebirds and Monarchs and Gulf fritillaries and Hummingbirds and Grey hairstreaks and Thread-waisted wasps and Lacewings and Soldier beetles. So many Native bees! The garden calls for even more than I desire like the aphids and mosquitos and deer and the groundhogs, the raccoons and stray cats and snakes and skunks... the garden provides consistent evidence of symbiosis, the way one species calls to another, which shows that we were in fact made for (and by) one another. The mere sowing of a seed sets this into motion. 

When the amount of change I want to see in the world seems insurmountable, it's helpful to remember that even small acts of tending to the garden can give back in dividends. And although I have often yearned for complete healing or complete renewal or complete acceptance – clean slates – as my body ages, as I learn more of the ways I am tethered to all that I love that is vulnerable in the world, I am confronted with dissonance. And I wonder, can I live fully amongst these unknowns, furthermore, can I call out into the darkness, even my own darkness, with full-throated song?"

-Karen Seapker

"You, my own deep soul,

Trust me. I will not betroy you.

My blood is alive with many voices

Telling me I am made of longing.

What mystery breaks over me now?

In its shadow I come to life.

For the first time I am alone with you –

you, my power to feel."

-Rainer Maria Rilke