Dawn Cerny's lecture was interesting and complex. She seems
really interested in dark subject matter combined with humour. I like contrasts
within my own artwork, so I appreciated seeing it in hers. For a few of her
sculptures, she painted or posted shadows on the ground, and that reminded me
of Ruthie. Cerny seems to have an obsession with the pain of others, of
herself, of laughing at it, and trying to take things apart. As a kid, she read
Mad magazine, the Bible, and other
satirical works. They seemed to serve as coping mechanisms as she encountered a
lot of rough things as a kid. Funny since she lived in a surreal, weird little
Disney kind of town. I feel like that contrast could've been a big influence.
She began looking at encyclopaedias from
various time periods to find what remained throughout time and what got left
out or changed. All of these things seemed to be a kind of personal research.
Cerny is interested in undoing things: chaos, history, culture, politics. She
was into theatre and miming for a time, as it was a kind of undoing of emotion
and the human experience. She also seems to be interested in failure, at one
point talking about a "festival of failure."
After being
accepted to a master's program in sculpture, she worked on a sculpture suit to
try and figure out sculpture and how to work as a sculptor. That was a kind of
research just within her medium. I feel like her research is important to her
work and how she creates work, but it's not surface-level. it's deep within the
work, it's concealed within it, but it's a vital structure. One of the works
that she focused in on was her tableaux of little trash soldiers. They're made
of paper and pretty small, and she liked that fragility and how they looked
like rubbish. Cerny wanted to consider epics versus singular works, then it
seems like the idea of singular works powerful enough to exist as epics within
themselves. She finished her lecture with a few unanswered questions. The one
that stood out to me was: "is the comedic a kind of moral impulse toward
'truth'?" I enjoyed her lecture and I think her ideas are fantastic. I'd
like to learn more about her thought process, with art and just in general.
She's pretty interesting and I don't get her. I like that.
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