Improvisation in Dawn Cerny’s work feels more like negotiation than freedom. Her sculptures often appear held together provisionally, with the comic vulnerability of systems barely functioning but surviving nonetheless. Looking at them, I think about the small town where I live—everything works just well enough. Do you take your car to the cheap, nearby mechanic who returns your car with grease on the steering wheel and a strange smell in the upholstery or do you drive further and pay more for a cleaner job? And there is the sense that the local institutions are always one loose screw away from collapse. Cerny understands this atmosphere of precarious maintenance.
There is frequently something literally doing the work of holding her sculptures together—straps, supports, balancing acts, awkward joins. Disaster is just around the corner! Semi-functional structures resemble obstacle courses, props, or furniture caught mid-gag—the slapstick is fully embraced.
What excites me most about her recent watercolor and gouache renderings of sculptures is the way they freeze this kinetic energy into cartoon-like stills. These are not documentation images so much as suspended events. Flattened into two dimensions, the sculptures become improvisations paused in motion: tender diagrams of contingency. Beneath the awkwardness there is care, persistence, and the ongoing labor of holding things together.
