NIGHT SHADES

daphne:art GALLERY AND ADVISORY presents Night Shades in collaboration with ODETTA Gallery. This exhibition by artists Nancy Baker, Geoffrey Parker and Claire Seidl offers paintings and photographs that elicit memories, address tensions, and suggest alternative realities. Together, the triad conveys aspects of our dystopia.

Nancy Baker’s acrylic on wood panel paintings were selected from of a series she made in 2021. Each imparts a surreal atmosphere with abstracted forms in nonspecific landscapes. Though not immediately apparent, the floating, geometric imagery refers to the barrels and bullets of guns. Baker’s anti-gun message is rendered universal by the anonymity of her ethereal spaces, conveying the cool and inhuman purpose of the weapons.

Baker earned her BFA from the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been widely exhibited throughout the US, including ODETTA Gallery in Brooklyn, NY; Front Room Gallery in Brooklyn, NY; Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles; Winkleman Gallery, NYC; Schema Projects, Brooklyn, NY; Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Greenhill Center, Greensboro, NC; Jancar Gallery, Los Angeles; NC Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; 1708 Gallery, Richmond VA; Heriard Cimino Gallery in New Orleans; and Lump Gallery, Raleigh, NC.

Claire Seidl has been an abstract painter for forty years and a photographer for twenty. In both her painting and photography, she explores the same formal concerns, creating work that challenges our perception of the often thin line between reality and abstracted memory. Her photographs hold multiple layers of space and reflections in focus while we can only perceive one at a time. They are not manipulated in the darkroom, rather, Seidl’s photographs are taken at night when our ability to see clearly is limited but the open gaze of the camera dispassionately records everything. She uses long exposures which capture the small, even insignificant or sporadic movements of a person, a shaft of light, or slow-

moving waves on a lake, revealing a visible record of time passing, of memory enhanced.

Seidl received her BFA from the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University. She received her MFA in Painting from Hunter College, City University of New York and taught in the art department at Hunter College for a decade. Seidl also studied photography at the International Center for Photography, and she was a member of the art department faculty at Hofstra University for five years. 

Geoffrey Parker Geoff began making art as a child. He watched as his father, Robert Andrew Parker, the renowned painter and illustrator, churned out work for publications such as The New Yorker and Fortune magazine. Friend and neighbor Ed Sorel, also a well-known, professional illustrator was another early mentor. For many years, Geoff was a freelance artist for The London Times and The New Yorker. Both publications hired him to make illustrations for reviews and other work. His celebrity portraits include rock stars Patti Smith and Lou Reed. He also spent time as a merchant marine stationed in the Baltic Sea, where he spent his nights painting oil rig platforms, bouys and lighthouses illuminated by single lights in the ominous cold waters. Glimpses of Geoff’s influences, George Bellows and Edward Hopper, John Graham, and Rockwell Kent, are evident in his compact, taut compositions.

daphne:art GALLERY AND ADVISORY was founded in 2024 by veteran art museum curator Daphne Anderson Deeds. Located in her Litchfield Connecticut home, the gallery presents art in all media by artists from throughout the US in a relaxed, domestic setting. ODETTA Gallery, opened in Brooklyn in 2014, exhibits artists’ works who have honed their craft and their vision in new genre, shared gallery spaces. Directed by artist Ellen Hackl Fagan, special interest is given to contemporary painting, sculpture, glyphs, music, Color Field, Buddha Mind, and encyclopedic obsessiveness.