"First of all, a soul is not something that you have. It is what you are."
Seven Sisters is pleased to present Seth Cameron's Storyteller–an exhibition of recent paintings and a video essay that imagines James Taylor, the singer-songwriter, as a vessel for navigating the complicated history of the American South.
Storyteller is Cameron's second body of work, entirely comprised of images, and is a sequel to his exhibition "The Tourist" at Nina Johnson in Miami, FL, earlier this year. While he continues exploring the ethereal potential of sumi ink with restraint and detachment, he introduces color by dyeing his linen canvases with saturated hues from beetle red to hazy blue. In a nod to material transference, he's framed each work in raw pine, referencing the source of sumi ink: the soot of burnt pine, and a nod to what happens to our bodies when placed in pine boxes.
This metaphysical meander is underscored by the influence of Jane Roberts' "The Seth Material," a series of channeled texts that first articulated foundational concepts of the New Age movement. The energy personality "Seth" spoke through Roberts on the afterlife, reincarnation, health, dreams, out-of-body experiences, the true nature of time, and theism. First encountered by Cameron in a thrift store, the echo of his name on the cover led him to pick up the book and listen to original recordings that further ponder the nature of physical reality and the multi-dimensional self. The exhibition's star-filled night skies and radiant moonbows nod to out-of-body viewing, navigation, and phenomenology. And maybe Ad Reinhardt's assertion that "We don't finish but begin with a flat space. An artist tries to make it alive – YOU are its subject finally – [s]he tries to make YOU alive…Try it yourself. YOU hold the cosmos in a color."
The lyricism and melody of folk music, the immensity of nature, romanticism, and the phenomenon of pop culture all play supporting roles in Storyteller. Cameron hints that any narrative is inherently laced with narcissism and subjectivity– cue depictions of Caravaggio's Narcissus, whose allegorical transmutation into a daffodil is also shown at its peak of beauty. The temporality of flowers hints at a timeline for those acting from the standpoint of survival that only looks inward and ends in immobility. Singular carpenter beeks kept specimen-like under glass are painted in infrared hues – chance reflections hint that the glass represents the invisible edge of the knowable world.
In a dialectical investigation of a narrator's role, Cameron employs the objective distance of a photographer while delving into the poetic and haunting coincidence of place, nomenclature, and the weight of cultural inheritance in depicting history. Having grown up in South Carolina and having the dishonor of sharing the same last name (Cameron) as the pro-Confederacy family at the center of the racist and fictional account of the rise of the Klan in D.W. Griffith's 1915 film "The Birth of a Nation," Seth Cameron looks closely at the strength of influence in image making, unreliable narrators, and the transition of stills and paintings into moving pictures. In painting the Cameron family home in flames, the artist channels an unsettling image in the vein of Andy Warhol's Electric Chair– to evoke the horror of emptiness, the nightmare of history, and the persistence of violence.
Seth Cameron (b. 1982, South Carolina, lives and works in New York City and Connecticut) was raised in the Southern foothills of the Appalachian Mountains to a family of preachers and teachers; Seth Cameron 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).
