Dawn Cerny’s ‘Coconut Effect’ at Hawthorn Contemporary

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Photo courtesy Hawthorn Contemporary

Dawn Cerny's "The Coconut Effect"

Dawn Cerny's "The Coconut Effect"

While some artists draw content from universes beyond, and others an imaginary one within, Seattle-based artist Dawn Cerny’s work comes from a world we share. One that is so present that it almost goes unnoticed. Her subtle world of mundane brilliance is on full display at Hawthorn Contemporary where her current exhibition “The Coconut Effect” runs through May 4

The exhibition strikes an informal tone from the beginning, offering a mix of drawings, wall sculpture, and draped textiles. The entire arrangement feels insistent but unfussy. Transparent screens that might be minimalist architectural propositions descend from such heavens to reveal themselves as repurposed curtains and informal remnants. The patterning on one, an opaque black tapestry, hangs on a line and surprises us with its cockeyed checkerboard of loosely affixed disposable alcohol wipes. We’re now firmly in the world of earthly things and human care, a revelation that colors the rest of the work in the exhibition. The wall sculptures which might have been lofty constructivist visions sink willingly into a world of the familiar. In Cerny’s case this is a world of significance, survival, purpose, and perseverance.

As a mother and a cancer survivor her work doesn’t seem to have time or patience for quaint ecstasies and privileged sublimations. If Malevich found meaning in a transcendent Beyond, Cerny finds it in an ever-present Within; in the stuff that accumulates around us every day, indirectly revealing a larger picture about ourselves. Some of the stories are literal, like cut coupons, some are metaphorical, like wall sculptures-as-displays-as-supports-as-monuments, and others are ambiguously in-between, like an elegantly draped orange dish towel or the aforementioned textile screens. The stuff in-between has a lot of room to move given the space opened by Cerny’s visual language.

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Photo courtesy Hawthorn Contemporary

Dawn Cerny's "The Coconut Effect"

Dawn Cerny's "The Coconut Effect"

Quirky Whirlygiggy

Brilliance rises from those formal and literal margins. One of the wall-mounted sculptures Shadow of the Pillar at Noon appears for a split second to be the magically formal love child of Richard Tuttle and Hans Arp until a coupon in the lower left for laundry detergent delivers the assemblage back into the world of the purposefully banal. The chunky, taupe-colored object becomes a shelf and a caddy of the sort that would hang at the entryway to a suburban home, holding loose keys to nowhere, stained foreign pocket change, and rebate coupons long past their terminal date. But also the drawings from our children at restaurants, too insubstantial for the hope chest, but too cosmically meaningful to ever let go. Cerny’s quirky whirlygiggy piece Hanami might be the show’s ultimate encapsulation. It looks like atomic-age clock merged with a clothesline and waited in public for individuals to deposit their waste on it with Jenga-like precision. An array of matte blue dowels radiates from a bracket on which hangs a series of funky and eclectic drawings. With a growing sense of the artist’s language and sources, the eccentric humor of the work yields to a sense of human struggle for maintenance, administration, and preservation.

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Photo courtesy Hawthorn Creative

Dawn Cerny's "The Coconut Effect"

Dawn Cerny's "The Coconut Effect"

I’m not sure what the “Coconut Effect” is. Maybe it’s the feeling of trying to protect the sweet flesh of life inside a hard protective shell. Maybe it’s the profound earthly a-ha that comes from being struck hard from above. And maybe it’s everything in-between: purgatories and paradises living in the gaps, margins, piles of detritus, overlooked crannies, cabinets, caddies, and curios. Cerny’s work is truly mundane in one sense, but ecstatic as a Counter Reformation altarpiece in another. And maybe it’s everything in-between: purgatories and paradises living in the gaps, margins, piles of detritus, overlooked crannies, cabinets, caddies, and curios. Cerny’s work is a celebration of the humdrum and humble that happens to offer occasional ecstasies as a grand as those in Counterreformation altarpieces.

Event Listings: March 17– March 23, 2024

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Art Making: Kohl’s Art Studio
• Sunday, March 17, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Book Sale
• Sunday, March 17, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museums

• Drop-In Tours: Architecture and Collection Highlights
• Sunday, March 17, 2–3 p.m.

MARN ART+CULTURE Hub

• MIAD x MARN Community Art Critique
• Sunday, March 17, 4:30–6 p.m.

MARN ART+CULTURE Hub

MARN Trivia with Sculpture Milwaukee

• Monday, March 18, 6–8 p.m.

Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum

• Work from Home Wednesday: coworking session at the Villa
• Wednesday, March 20, 12–3 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Group Therapy (Men): Black Space at MAM
• Wednesday, March 20, 5:30–7 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Gallery Talk: “Beyond Heights: Skyscrapers and the Human Experience”
• Thursday, March 21, 12–1 p.m.

MARN ART+CULTURE Hub

• “Junk in the Trunk” social mixer
• Thursday, March 21, 2–5 p.m.

Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA)

• Behind the Scenes with Artist Chris Cornelius
• Thursday, March 21, 4:30–6 p.m.

MARN ART+CULTURE Hub

• Milwaukee Fashion Network - Master Hatters
• Thursday, March 21, 6–8 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Screening: Close to Vermeer
• Thursday, March 21, 6:15–8 p.m.
• House of Rad
• hRAD grillin' & chillin'
• Friday, March, 22, 5:30–9 p.m.

Portrait Society Gallery

• Opening Reception: “400 Portraits from the Art Students League: Oscar Gruber”
• Friday, March 22, 6–8 p.m.

Grohmann Museum

• Opening reception: “H.D. Tylle at Seventy: American Worklife”
• Friday, March 22, 6–8 p.m.

Arts at Large

• Closing Reception for Artist-In-Residence Paula Lovo
• Friday, March 22, 6–9 p.m.

Brown Deer Public Library

• Spring Art and Craft Fair
• Saturday, March 23, 10 a.m.–1:30 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Art Making: Kohl’s Art Studio
• Saturday, March 23, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Milwaukee Arty Museum

• Story Time in the Galleries
• Saturday, March 23, 10:30–11 a.m.

Grove Gallery

• Closing Reception: Rachel Foster, “Empathetic Objects”
• Saturday, March 23, 12–5 p.m.

Mitchell Street Arts (MiSA)

• Making Rorschach Tests to explore the unconscious with Fidel Alec Rodriguez
• Saturday, March 23, 1–2 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Tour: Celebrating Women Artists
• Saturday, March 23, 2–3 p.m.

Lynden Sculpture Garden

• Reception: "The Time Has Come: The Lynden Staff Exhibition"
• Saturday, March 23, 2–4 p.m.

Grilled Cheese Grant Finalist Exhibition

• Vanguard Sculpture Services, 3374 W Hopkins Street, MKE
• Saturday, March 23, 3–8 p.m.

Saint Kate, the Arts Hotel

• AIR Time, Art & Studio Tour with AIR Anwar Floyd-Pruitt
• Saturday, March 23, 6:30 p.m.