Sherry Kerlin: Dolly's Bad Dream: The KuBe Art Center, Beacon, NY

Ethan Cohen Gallery at the KuBe Art Center is pleased to announce Dolly’s Bad Dream, a selection of works on paper by Sherry Kerlin.

Caught in the eternal moment of emerging, Kerlin’s subjects occupy a permanent condition of almost-being. Presented through a fine, diaphanous fog, a precise degree of imprecision, they remain evanescent, always in a state of becoming. Equally, they may be waning: having arrived at full clarity, they may be slipping away. We may be looking at afterimages. Whether embryonic or already fading, these figures evoke the caprices of time and the transience of life.

Kerlin’s imagery begins with familiar, often sentimental photographs of infants, pets, mothers, and families. Through airbrushing and other interventions, these seemingly conventional images undergo a radical transfiguration. An elusive quality envelops her subjects, prompting the viewer to strain to grasp the image, hold it still, or bring it fully into focus. Kerlin invites the viewer to participate in the process of realization, drawing on their own imagination to complete what remains unresolved. Her work becomes an inquiry into perception and the making of an image, moving between representation and abstraction.

Alongside her artistic practice, Kerlin has spent decades as a professional photo retoucher and restorer, working extensively with airbrushing techniques that smooth, fade, and merge defined edges. In her works, this language of fading takes on an emotional charge. Her images haunt the viewer with questions of mortality and the transience of life, all the more affecting because the images depict cherished, vulnerable, beings. The incipience of fragility adds, therefore, a layer of feeling, of emotional poignancy, to the aesthetic and metaphysical questioning.

Simultaneously, though, Kerlin undercuts the sentiment with her highly intentional scathingly ironic titles, adding yet more layers – social, religious, phobic - to the multi tiered commentary in her works. Slyly profane and satirical, these titles unsettle our understanding of the images, bringing darker thoughts and associations to the surface. A small child grasping his stuffed toy is titled “Young Christ Seeking Comfort From His Teddy Bear." A little girl in a tutu flanked by a skull is titled “Death and the Ballerina.” Two figures in conversation is titled “Witch discussing with Christ the Ethicacy of Casting Spells."

Kerlin’s works explore enduring questions around the confrontation between art and life, immortality and transience, art and craft, painting and photography, perception and reality, the physical and metaphysical. She has, she says, ‘spent a lot of time with philosophers, metaphysicians and psychics probing the mystery of things: reality is an illusion.”

About Sherry Kerlin

Sherry Kerlin is from Oklahoma, and now lives and works in New York City. She attended the Chicago Art Institute and completed her BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute, in Kansas City. Kerlin has been exhibiting her work since 1981 in New York and throughout the United States. She received a grant in 1995 from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and in 1992 she received a residency at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

Hours: Every Saturday, Tours at 2 pm

About The KuBe Art Center:

Established in 2011, The KuBe (Kunsthalle Beacon) is a 127,000 square foot art center located in Beacon, New York at the site of a former high school. The KuBe Art Center includes the Joan Lebold Cohen and Jerome A. Cohen Center for Visual Arts, The Chongmao and Zheng Ruyu Theater, which hosts experimental community film, theater, and dance projects. Additionally, The Kube provides 48 artists' studios, and commercial office spaces which have hosted a variety of community-based business ranging from puppeteers to political campaign headquarters. In 2023 the KuBe Art Center received The Arts Mid-Hudson Arts Organization Executive Arts Award. We wish to extend an invitation to you to join the Hudson Valley community in Beacon to discover our emerging incubator and visit exhibitions of internationally acclaimed artists in our expansive galleries.

About Ethan Cohen Gallery

From the very beginning, Ethan Cohen Gallery has represented a pioneering blend of both emerging and internationally renowned artists. Many of the emerging artists have now become household names. Mr. Cohen has steered the gallery to occupy a distinct place in contemporary art as a center of innovation across disciplines and countries. Today Ethan Cohen Gallery has three gallery locations, two in Chelsea in the heart of New York City and the other in Beacon, New York.

Ethan Cohen first founded his gallery in 1987 as Art Waves/Ethan Cohen in SoHo, New York. A groundbreaker in the field of contemporary Chinese art, Ethan Cohen was the first gallerist to present the Chinese Avant-Garde of the 1980s to the United States. Ethan Cohen Gallery today represents a diverse global mix of contemporary and post war contemporary art, specializing in contemporary Asian art and contemporary African art.

Press Contacts:

Donna Mikkelsen – donna@ecfa.com

Lara Kamhi - lara@ecfa.com