In the Backspace /

Seepage by SK Reed and Colleen RJC Bratton

June 01 - July 01, 2023
Opening Reception / Thursday, June 01, 5–8pm

Seepage is a duo show by artists SK Reed (Kansas City, KS) and Colleen RJC Bratton (Seattle, WA). Drawn together by their shared interest in ecocentrism and the freedoms this presents for self-expression and beneficial symbiosis, Reed and Bratton present both collaborative and solo drawings, paintings and sculptures in SOIL’s backspace gallery. 

The term “seepage” refers to an uncontrollable leak, liquids or gasses slowly breaking through their former barriers. The word commonly speaks to shifts in the landscape, whether by natural forces or harm caused by humans. Further, Bratton and Reed consider their bodies in relation to this leaking and breakage. In Seepage, the artists question the harm of capitalism on the Earth, the Earth's combatance, and the critical connections and similarities found in our own human bodies.

In Reed’s work, fluid and Sci-Fi “Creatures” engage with and learn from their non-humancompanions. They look to all the animate species surrounding them for relief from the intensely gendered and capitalist present. Reed speaks to the lost and critical connections between their body and the local environment. Spending time outside, they realize a greater kin they have been neglecting: the birds, water, animals, and plants that also call Kansas and Missouri home. Using painting, ceramic, and installation practices Reed imagines a world where bodies are more than their physicalities and the wisdom of the more-than-human beings we share this world with are prioritized over profit.

Bratton illuminates formal and sentimental parallels between the human body and other bodies (both cosmic and microscopic) to create routes for empathetic experience and understanding. For the works in Seepage, Bratton regards the ripple effects of climate change seen in natural disasters as Earth’s attempt at recalibration. Natural disasters are viewed as a defense mechanism, like that of a body using fever to combat an illness. With the system’s imbalance at the forefront of their mind, Bratton reveals the fluid state of material found in droughts, floods, and wildfires. Bringing in her own personal experience as a semisolid body, Bratton feels the dryness of the lakebed as she weans her child off nursing or the choking of the forest from smog as its ashen ghosts fill her lungs.