The Stranger

Entrance is pleased to present two solo exhibitions by Seth Cameron, his first New York exhibitions in six years. The Stranger is a suite of sumi-ink paintings titled The Stranger (Chrysanthemums) on the ground level of the gallery. A Great Man on the lower level includes a new video essay titled A Great Man. Together they extend his ongoing work on how lived experience is shaped and fractured by what it inherits. "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure." —Albert Camus, The Stranger Albert Camus describes the funeral scene in The Stranger with plain, unadorned detail: a son at his mother’s coffin, the hard light, the slow procession of mourners, the chrysanthemums beside her body. That flower carries a long association with mourning across East Asia and Europe, a funerary history that extends into both literature and painting. It surfaces again in the early work of Piet Mondrian, where its Romantic and memorial associations haunt the canonical story of abstraction’s clean ascent. Cameron takes up the chrysanthemum once more by rendering it only as shadow. Multiplying across the linen, the shadows are shaped by shifting distances, angles, colors, and intensities of light, giving the images a fleeting, spectral quality. The sumi-ink tradition brings with it an attentiveness to impermanence, articulated through the idea of mono no aware, the awareness of beauty in impermanence. In this light, the painted surface behaves less as a metaphorical mirror or window than as a veil — a threshold between psychic realms. The series turns on the space between perception and understanding, holding open the gap between seeing and knowing. Seth Cameron (b. 1982, South Carolina) is a painter, writer, and filmmaker based in New York and Connecticut. His practice places painting’s material conditions alongside the structures of narrative, attending to how experience moves through what it inherits. Recent solo exhibitions include Storyteller (2024), Seven Sisters Gallery, Houston; and The Tourist (2024), Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami. Earlier solo exhibitions include The Fair Mountain (2020), Nina Johnson Gallery, Sunless (2019), Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York; Suns (2018), McClain Gallery, Houston; No Paintings (2017), Nathalie Karg Gallery; Measure for Measure (2016), Nina Johnson Gallery; and Suns (2016), Susan Inglett Gallery, New York. From 2004 to 2017, Cameron helped lead The Bruce High Quality Foundation, a collective that reimagined institutional critique, collaborative practice, and experimental arts education for a post-9/11 generation. His work has appeared in major institutional exhibitions including Greater New York (MoMA PS1), the Whitney Biennial, Dublin Contemporary, the Lyon Biennale, and the Sundance Film Festival. The Foundation was the subject of a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in 2013. Cameron has taught at The Cooper Union, served as Critic-in-Residence at MICA’s Hoffberger School of Painting, directed the Children’s Museum of the Arts, and led BHQFU. He received his BFA from The Cooper Union.