NinaJohnson

Nina Johnson is pleased to announce The Tourist, a solo exhibition of all new paintings created within the last year by South Carolina-born, New York-based artist Seth Cameron. Opening February 1st in the Exhibition Library, the works in the show take on themes of estrangement and grief while further expanding the investigation of the fluidity of language and image characteristic of the artist’s practice.

Of note in the exhibition is The Stranger (chrysanthemums) (series), which pays homage to Manet’s practice of painting flowers in his last years of life as he was alone and dying from syphilis, as well as to Mondrian’s secret practice of painting chrysanthemums while publicly championing pure abstraction. For Cameron, these quiet practices offer a complex depiction of grief, akin to Camus’ imagining of grief in the novel The Stranger. In his series, begun in October as crisis consumed Israel and Palestine, Cameron was inspired by the sun reflecting in his studio, casting the silhouette of a plant across a blank canvas. This image reversed the light of the painting to portray what Cameron viewed as deep emptiness reflective of similar grief.

In The Tourist, a painting after which the exhibition is named, Cameron imagines the caricature of the tourist as an ironic colonizer or Calvinist God, experiencing the world entirely through the lens of a camera in which reality is outside the frame, everything is desired, and nothing is ever physically touched.

“I think these paintings help me give a kind of dialogical order to the world,” said Seth Cameron. “For me, beauty lives on the razor’s edge between overwhelmedness and detachment.”

The Tourist will be on view through March 30th, 2024.