Enter Viewing Room

Dawn Cerny, Carrie Cook, Megan Cotts, Rachel Hellerich, Robert Yoder, HK Zamani

Curated by Lauren Fejarang

Press Release

Press Release

Super Dutchess is pleased to present ENTER VIEWING ROOM, a virtual group show featuring Dawn Cerny, Carrie Cook, Megan Cotts, Rachel Hellerich, Robert Yoder and HK Zamani. While we are inside of our homes for long intervals of the day we zoom in on surfaces and spaces – daydreaming through portals of fantasy. Our bodies transition towards domesticity and they are forced to find stimulation within the spaces they occupy. This show investigates that experience – a new normal that finds surfaces underneath surfaces, hears melody in light, and sees color in the steam of the shower. It’s stepping back to take extra care in everyday objects while finding joy in a table or window; making rituals more intimate and meaningful. A shower, that is blind but felt, is experienced on all of its surfaces. It’s taking notice of bunched fabric hanging on the door to the bedroom, knowing its actual purpose is to wrap itself around a wet body. 

Gertrude Stein, from “Tender Buttons”, written in New York, in 1914: 

A NEW CUP AND SAUCER.

Enthusiastically hurting a clouded yellow bud and saucer, enthusiastically so is the bite in the ribbon. 

OBJECTS.

Within, within the cut and slender joint alone, with sudden equals and no more than three, two in the centre make two one side. 

If the elbow is long and it is filled so then the best example is all together. 

The kind of show is made by squeezing. 

A HANKERCHIEF. 

A winning of all the blessings, a sample not a sample because there is no worry. 

A TABLE.

A table means does it not my dear it means a whole steadiness. Is it likely that a change. 

A table means more than a glass even a looking glass is tall. A table means necessary places and a revision a revision of a little thing it means it does mean that there has been a stand, a stand where it did shake. 

Stein’s passages reflect on existing in space with objects but also taking note of that thin in-between space of objects and bodies navigating each other. She finds poetry in the mundane and a narrative for sensation. ENTER VIEWING ROOM is that thin domestic space where moments become slower and the air heavier. 

ENTER VIEWING ROOM is now on view through April 29th. 

Dawn Cerny -(b. Carpentaria, CA, resides in Seattle, WA) uses her work to look for aspects of the comedic and tragic aspects of humans’ drive for safety and desire to belong. Art critic Jen Graves described Cerny’s work as “…literary, historical, and political. It's also messy, pulpy, direct, and poetically profound. Oh, and it's funny.”  Her works on paper, sculptures, plays, and collaborative projects have been exhibited at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Western Bridge, Seattle; Seattle Art Museum; On The Boards Open Studio, Seattle; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto, ON;  Derek Eller Gallery, New York; Or Gallery, Vancouver, Canada; and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Cerny’s exhibitions and work have been written about in Art Forum, Art Week, Art On Paper, The Stranger, and the Seattle Times. Cerny has been a two-time recipient of a Washington State Art Commission Fellowship and was a recent Artist in Residence at Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, WA. Cerny received a BFA in printmaking and painting from Cornish College of the Arts and an MFA in sculpture from Bard College Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Annandale-on- Hudson, NY. Currently, she is an adjunct professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Seattle University. 

Carrie Cook is an artist based in Los Angeles. She uses drawing, painting, collage, sculpture and writing. Current paintings and collage works emerge from meditations on water, night, light at night, dreaming, weather, and other moments of transition and transformation. Her work explores liminal space, altered psychic states, and the necessity of surviving multiple worlds. Her work has been shown at Insect Gallery, Dread Lounge, No Gallery, Visitor Welcome Center, Gallery Also, and others around Los Angeles. She has been included in exhibitions in Texas at Texas Christian University Art Gallery, Art Palace, Blaffer Museum of Art and Domy Books. 

Megan Cotts (b. 1979, New York, NY) Lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2009. She has exhibited her solo work at Klowden Mann, Dan Graham and Compact Space in Los Angeles, Junior Projects, False Flag, AIR Gallery, and New Release in New York, TSA in Brooklyn, I-A-M Gallery and Atelierhof Kreuzberg in Berlin, Germany, and SIA Gallery in Sheffield, England. She has participated in the Terra Summer Residency in Giverny, France, the Vermont Studio Center, the GlogauAIR Artist in Residence Program in Berlin, Germany and the I-A-M Artist in Residence Program in Berlin, Germany. Cotts has also performed and exhibited with D3 at Machine Project and Human Resources in Los Angeles, CCS Gallery at UC Santa Barbara, and Central Trak Gallery in Dallas. She is represented by Klowden Mann in Los Angeles

Rachel Hellerich is a Connecticut based artist that creates work within the realm of geometric abstraction and its relationship to Precisionism. She earned a Post-Baccalaureate certificate from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2004) and a Bachelor of Science from Southern Connecticut State University (2003).  She has exhibited extensively in the greater New York area and her work can be found in many US and International collections. She was recently awarded a Connecticut Artist Fellowship Award in Artistic Excellence (2019).

Robert Yoder is a nationally exhibiting artist with over 30 years of exhibition record.  Robert's work has been the focus of numerous solo and group shows across America and Europe, including shows at Charles Cowles Gallery, Seattle Art Museum, Frye Art Museum and the Peeler Art Center.  His work in is many public collections including Microsoft, Boeing, Hallmark, Nike, Twitter and Hewlett Packard.  Museums that own his work include Seattle Art Museum, Portland Art Museum (Oregon), Tacoma Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Whitney Museum of Art Book Arts Collection and The Henry Art Gallery. Robert was the recipient of a Pollack Krasner Foundation Grant, as well as an Artist Trust Fellowship award and the University of Washington School of Art Alumni Award.  He is a contributing writer to the recently published book “The Artist as Culture Producer” edited by Sharon Louden.  His work is represented by Frosch & Portmann, New York and Zurich; and Platform, Seattle, Washington. 

HK Zamani is a multidisciplinary artist and curator, and founder of PØST, an alternative exhibition space in Los Angeles (1995-2020), where more than five hundred exhibits have been hosted. His abstract paintings are terse and meditative, painterly and deliberately composed. These formal abstractions are inspired by earlier works in which the symbolic appearance of a dome or tent structure is recurring. Interested in the shifting nature of perception and optics, Zamani has drawn from a varied sensory spectrum ranging from the ascetic to the psychedelic. He has exhibited extensively, is a recipient of COLA and CCF Grants, and is in the collections of LA County Museum of Art and Berkley Museum of Art.