Seth Cameron

"In my own paintings, generally of landscapes, I think about the conditions of the sublime, how little it takes to create space, and how space can overwhelm us. That’s the power of the sublime—its duplicity—the comfort of being subsumed bound to the terror of the unknown. Why have I tried to paint this experience? To control it, to understand it, to “process it” somehow—simple curiosity always seemed like enough of a reason."

–Seth Cameron
B . 1982, SOUTH CAROLINA

LIVES AND WORKS IN NEW YORK, NY and CONNECTICUT

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Raised in the Southern foothills of the Appalachian mountains to a family of preachers and teachers, Seth Cameron (b. 1982, South Carolina) became neither and both. At the turn of the century, he expatriated to New York City, graduating from The Cooper Union School of Art before establishing the iconoclastic artist collective, The Bruce High Quality Foundation. The Foundation has been included in Greater New York at MOMA PS1, The Whitney Biennial, and The Sundance Film Festival, and was the subject of a 2013 retrospective at The Brooklyn Museum of Art. Beyond the collective's artistic practice, Cameron founded and directed its free experimental art school, BHQFU (2009-17) alongside other forays into the field of art education, including leading The Intradisciplinary Seminar at Cooper Union, serving as Critic-in-Residence at the Hoffberger Graduate School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art (2022) and as Executive Director of Children’s Museum of the Arts (2020-2023).

In his practice Cameron draws influence from Chinese literati painting, New Wave cinema, Romantic landscape painting, postmodern confessional fiction, and post-painterly abstraction, creating philosophically and emotionally charged paintings and literary works that ask empty cups to be as sweet as the punch. Recent solo exhibitions include The Tourist (2024, Nina Johnson Gallery), The Fair Mountain (2020, Nina Johnson Gallery) Sunless (2019, Nathalie Karg Gallery) and Suns (2018, McClain Gallery).
"Abstraction is said to preclude narrative. What Cameron achieves is a quiet, compelling marriage of the two.”

–Ade J. Omotosho
Sumi Ink Series

Soldier, 2024, bleached linen, pine frame, framed: 22 7/8 x 15 x 2 1/2 inches

In the last years of his life, dying of syphilis, knowing he would die, Manet painted flowers. A rather extreme method for giving the subject back its traditional pathos, nonetheless, it works.

Since October, I too have wanted to paint flowers. Or, I suppose, to paint grief. I’ve wanted to paint grief the way Camus imagined it in “The Stranger” when Meursault smokes in the funeral parlor. I’ve wanted to paint grief the way Knausgaard wrote it:

“And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.”

Then one morning in the studio the sun came up, casting a plant’s silhouette across a blank canvas. Just like that the inner light of painting reversed, and I understood how to make a painting emptier.

-Seth Cameron
Works
- Seth Cameron, Untitled, 2020
Exhibitions
- SETH CAMERON
  STORYTELLER 14 Sep - 9 Nov 2024
  
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Press