"The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls. To him the shiny, enamelled signs of businesses are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to the bourgeois in his salon. The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done."
Walter Benjamin, 1938

In her installations of new drawings and prints, Seattle artist Dawn Cerny loosely bases her oeuvre on critic Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project, this series of drawing and engraving installations looks at perceptions of history.The Arcades Project was an encyclopaedic journey on which Walter Benjamin worked for thirteen years from 1927 until his death in 1940. The Project takes its name from a nineteenth century architectural form. It also borrows its structure from that same architectural form. Arcades were passages through blocks of buildings, lined with shops and other businesses The work is a satirical examination of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries to see how historical assumptions can be manipulated the further we drift from a collective knowledge of the facts.

"The feuilleton provided a market for belles-lettres in the daily newspaper. The introduction of this section summed up the changes which the July Revolution had brought to the press...In 1824 there were 47,000 subscribers to newpapers in Paris... in 1846, 200,000. ...informative items required little space. They and not the political editorials or the serialized novels enabled a newspaper to have a different look every day, an appearance that was cleverly varied when the pages were made up and constituted part of the paper's attractiveness. These items had to be constantly replenished. City gossip, theatrical intrigues and 'things worth knowing' were their most popular sources. Their intrinsic cheap elegance. a quality that became so characteristic of the feuilleton section, was in evidence from the beginning."
Walter Benjamin, 1938

Cerny's compositions exist more as feuilleton replacing text with fields of alternating symbolic objects and narrative actions which form iconic tableaus. The objects stand in relation to each other like the thousands of note cards Benjamin left hidden at the National Library in Paris, where each item is crucial to the translating of the overall concept.
"Fashion prescribed the ritual by which the fetish Commodity wished to be worshipped, and Grandville extended the sway of fashion over the objects of daily use as much as over the cosmos. In pursuing it to its extremes, he revealed its nature. It stands in opposition to the organic. It prostitutes the living body to the inorganic world. in relation to the living it represents the rights of the corpse. Fetishism, which succumbs to the sex appeal of the inorganic, is its vital nerve; and the cult of the commodity recruits this to its service." Walter Benjamin, 1935

Cerny's take on fashion gives us floating figures a la mode de Fragonard. Her back wall installation features scrappy dogs bursting out of the three ornate gilt rococo frames. The figures follow Degas' dictum "If it is going to go off the page, let it go off the page". They explode the picture plane to become something else. With all the hoopla and pretense which seems to be afflicting Pioneer Square these days, it is nice to see someone holding a mirror up to our day to day banality. Her deft hand and wry wit serve as a reality check for our over artiness.

The silhouettes on a side wall shed fictive tears drawn through cut out and shadow cascading to the floor. Facing away from each other, they make a unique cris de coeur about the isolation of the individual in society. Cerny is pulling art forms from the Victorian, Georgian, and rococo eras. The individual pieces read like file cards from the codex by Benjamin.

n 1940, Benjamin fled Paris only to be held as an undesirable alien by the Vichy government. Seeking to escape, he fled to Spain but was due to be deported back to France. That night, in a shabby hotel on the Franco-Spanish border, he took an overdose of sleeping pills and ended his life. Missing at the time of his death was a briefcase containing a manuscript which could have been a draft of the Arcades Project.

Cerny by taking Benjamin's process of extracting and indexing cultural phenomena gives the viewer a wild roller-coaster ride through the ethereal nature of history. By adhering to the transitive property of aesthetics, she shows us how the only constant in life is change. This property traduces forms making them both ephemeral and real in the mode and space of the time. This exhibition is the best thing going at the Toshiro Kaplan Building right now!

Gallery4Culture is located within the new 4Culture offices at 101 Prefontaine Pl. S., at the corner of Third and Prefontaine, in the Tashiro/Kaplan Building. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m., closed government holidays; the gallery is open and free to the public. For more information about this exhibition call 206 296.8674. The exhibition will run from May 4-26, 2006.

See the video here.

Read Weekly Art Critic Sue Peters Interview Here

Read Stranger Art Critic Jen Graves Review Here