Karen Seapker received her MFA from Hunter College in New York City, after which she spent time working in her studios in Brooklyn, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.  She additionally taught art at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania.  Her current studio is in Brooklyn, though she divides her time between that location and a home in Nashville.   In her canvases, Seapker imaginatively and with remarkable painterly dexterity conveys movement, the passage of time and the bursting of emotion in physically static two-dimension. Her images would risk the label of Mannerist if they were not so completely contemporary in their warping of time and experience. Bold strokes of color move across the canvases, but with greater purpose than abstraction often allows. At her best, Seapker treats us to time travel, to the experience of the worm hole that allows us to skip ahead and back at the same time. The figurative studies which she inserts in some of her time-warped spaces are eerily elegant and refer to older, academic styles of painting, yet their juxtaposition with near abstract/color-field backgrounds is strikingly contemporary. And those backgrounds are anything but static in the way that color-field canvases and much abstract art can be. Even her solid architectural elements, such as a bridge or overpass, have an ephemeral quality. The viewer feels the power of swirling vortexes and sweeping winds marking the passage of time, or the whirls of emotions, thoughts and interactions of the figures presented. Our vision is frozen just long enough, though, to capture vaguely familiar, perhaps ghostlike, images of people. They are often archetypes, but they are also clearly individuals who caught the artist's eye or imagination, and Seapker shares her fascination with them with the viewer.  It's as though we've been granted access to human memory, though not in a nostalgic manner; it is more like being made a part of a collective social subconscious. These are often unsettling images, both in their content and through their temporal and physical distortions, yet we are drawn deeply into them as comfortable voyeurs, perhaps experiencing a bit of déjà vu, or maybe a window into the future. www.KarenSeapker.com