Featured Exhibition
Night Shades, a new exhibition presented by daphne:art Gallery and Advisory in collaboration with ODETTA, brings together three artists—Nancy Baker, Claire Seidl, and Geoffrey Parker—whose paintings and photographs explore the uneasy edge between perception and memory, hinting at alternative realities, and brushing against dystopia.
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Nancy Baker’s acrylic on wood panel paintings from a series she made in 2021 appear atmospheric and almost psychedelic sometimes. On closer inspection, vivid circular patterns reveal themselves as mechanics of firearms—barrels, bullets, weapons components—floating in depersonalized landscapes. The effect is disarming. Rather than depicting violence directly, Baker frames its infrastructure in a way that removes emotional cues, instead offering a critique of the systems that normalize harm.
In the somber nocturnal Night Landscape, for instance, the weapon components hover above a luminous full moon whose reflection shimmers across the still dark waters below. The landscape is surreal and mysterious—clouds drift across a velvet sky, and jagged mountain silhouettes rise in the distance. Each element—sky, water, and terrain—is rendered with a quiet, deliberate precision, creating a hushed atmosphere. The floating weapons emit a pinkish-yellow aura that halos the moon and echoes in its reflection on the water. Suspended in the night sky, they resemble a constellation—or some strange spacecraft—their presence haunting the natural world.
Claire Seidl’s highly contrasted black and white photographs hold layers of a more abstracted space. Shot at night using long exposures, her images document several events within a single frame—light shifts, partial movements, layered reflections. They are not digitally altered. The camera acts as a passive witness, capturing more than the eye can register. Seidl typically sets up the camera on a tripod and leaves it to record, unattended, for the duration of the exposure. The camera’s open lens collects all available visual data—both fleeting and fixed—without intervention.
The result is a visible record of time unfolding in dynamic fragments. Figures, when present, may blur or vanish depending on their movement, while architectural and domestic elements often appear static and sharply defined. Even in the absence of people, traces of human presence remain—through objects, environments, or gestures. Perception, in Seidl’s work, becomes a negotiation with memory.
Geoffrey Parker’s paintings carry a different kind of weight. Rooted in direct observation and shaped by years of visual reporting, his compositions often depict isolated maritime structures—oil rigs, buoys, lighthouses—often lit by single, stark sources against dark water. After high school, Parker joined the Merchant Marineand traveled extensively aboard ships, including the Robert Conrad, Point Julie, Ogden Traveler, and Sealand St. Louis.
The imagery recalls time spent in the Baltic Sea, ports, and offshore zones in the Caribbean, South Pacific, and the Middle East. These locations and the structures he observed there form a visual archive that Parker draws from when painting. Each painting functions as both a document and a distillation.
The exhibition takes place in Litchfield County, Connecticut, at daphne:art Gallery and Advisory, founded in 2024 by curator Daphne Anderson Deeds. Housed in Deeds’ home, the gallery is intentionally intimate, offering a viewing experience that resists spectacle. ODETTA Gallery, based in Brooklyn and directed by Ellen HHideouackl Fagan, brings a longstanding commitment to artists working across disciplines and outside conventional formats. The collaboration suggests a shared investment in focused, conceptually grounded practices. @daphne:art
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An open house for Night Shades will take place on Sunday, April 27, from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. in Bantam, Connecticut. Guests must RSVP by April 25 to receive the address. Contact: daphneadeeds@gmail.com.