>> John Boylan: Good afternoon. I'm John Boylan, and I coordinate the studio99 program for Microsoft Research, and we're sponsoring this event today.
Quite often when we have these lectures, they are either scientists or people from far away. Today we have three local artists who were all part of The
Stranger Genius Awards, the three finalists, of whom one, Mary Ann Peters, is the winner. We also have Klara Glosova and Dawn Cerny. All three, stellar artists in Seattle.
And today we're going to hear about their work and about their ideas. And I believe that's it. We're not doing any other talks this year, but we will be back in January with some more lectures from the studio99 Presents series.
And if you don't know about studio99, feel free to talk to me afterwards.
So, again, welcome. And I believe that Dawn is up first. You teach at
Cornish?
>> Dawn Cerny: Mm-hmm.
>> John Boylan: And so following her -- I won't introduce each. Following her will be Klara Glosova who has done amazing projects around town including the legendary 5K Don't Run, which was a processional art event that ran for five years.
>> Dawn Cerny: Five years.
>> John Boylan: Yeah. Sorry. And Mary Ann Peters will speak last. So without further ado, thank you. Dawn.
[applause]
>> Dawn Cerny: Good afternoon. I want to thank Microsoft for hosting this event and also John Boylan, who I've known for a really long time weirdly.
So it's really a pleasure to get to see you and talk to you. And then I also wanted to thank The Stranger and then the other two, Klara and Mary Ann, especially Mary Ann because she drove.
Okay. So, first of all, it's a total delight to be here. Microsoft has always been in the root in my proletariat belly as my most favorite -- my most favorite company and PC. I have a total distrust and loathe of Apple, so I feel really happy to be here. Despite the fact that I own an iPhone, but that's a much longer story.
So there's a deep like political pleasure I get in being here and presenting this work. And this is a flag that I had made a few years ago when Gallery
4Culture in Seattle asked me to do a response to the hundredth year anniversary of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, which was largely a way of me kind of culling through a lot of archives and finding evidence of ways that Seattle had not changed at all in the last 100 years.

So I constructed these flags that kind of pointed both to the kind of like weird serial killer psyche that would bring anyone to come live in the
Northwest, and then also the set of thematics about the people that work here and why we work here and the kind of unspoken ethos of this place.
So in knowing that I was going to come and speak here, I pulled this flag that I had made and embroidered in 2008 as a kind of gift to a corporation that I have never been to but have a strange fandom for.
So beginning. I'm going to talk today a little bit less about the physical things that I make and more about the strategies of coming up with the ideas and then also modes of dissemination for the things that I make and that I'm interested in. I'll talk a little bit more about why I chose to do that in another slide.
But kind of fundamentally the thing that I'm interested in -- and that's a big word, fundamentally -- but the thing that I'm most curious about is the ways that -- the ways that people function or relate or make meaning or create value systems or things that upturn value systems in a kind of post-enlightenment world.
So this idea of there's no God anymore, then we become gods and then what the hell do we do with things like death, what kind of meaning or coping mechanisms do we do -- do we create when we have so little in our control.
So that's a small -- that's a small topic and a lot of really sloppy philosophical thinking on my part, but I'm not a philosopher so I can do whatever I want.
So this idea, right, in this set of -- under the big title and the ways that
I have kind of -- strategies I've used have been a lot of reading, a lot of thinking about deductive reasoning, a lot of using kind of almost satirical tactics in my work, like MAD Magazine, to kind of step outside or beside a lot of difficult conversations. And then also because I have a secret background in history that is now becoming more prevalent as I'm moving into performance again is this idea of a way that we suspend reality in literary ways or cinematic ways when we and are bodies are confronted with something and we're negotiating that difference. So theater is very important to me as well.
So the set of research that I've been working with over the last three years has more to do with the way that moving through my own kind of genealogical narrative, which relates, I'm sure, to a lot of our genealogical narratives -- i.e., people are weird, people do bad things, people do good things, moms are stressful, dads are absent and weird -- like all of those themes, right, as I focused in my own family's archive of objects, I became interested in the patterns of that collection, the patterns of narratives, the patterns of what we kept, like why this face and not this face, and -- or family lineage that kind of disappeared completely because there were no objects.

So in thinking about making, I'm also really interested in where this thing goes and how it operates. Right? And is it just speaking to me? Am I just processing something through the things that I'm making, or am I trying to construct something that could have some kind of palliative value or like delight or beauty value to somebody else.
So this way that familial behaviors -- even the way I'm talking like this, right? My mom was a teacher, and she did this a lot, too. I'm like, oh,
I -- right, when I'm nervous or I'm trying to work through something, using my hands. That's a kind of really physical behavior, right, that was inherited. And whether it was learned, right, or whether it was something that I just completely embody, this is something that I'm interested in the ways that those familial narratives are kind of genealogical narratives, and then the narrative of the West specifically and Western civilization kind of mirror each other and cross over. In a nutshell. What a weird -- what a weird set of thinking.
Okay. So in really focusing on this idea in the last few years, these behaviors or gestures, physicality became really interesting to me and the ways that tenderness or empathy were kind of isolated within one gesture.
My work up until this point had been largely viral. It would be quite instillational, incredibly didactic, like the way I'm speaking now. And it always kind of needed one thing to relate to another thing in order for you to kind of piece the mystery together or piece the thinking together.
And what I became interested in is trying to figure out how I could kind of isolate these kind of family behaviors or memories into singular objects.
And so here are some exercises in trying to think about formal language, so a crumple, a slump.
And what I found in doing all of these things is a couple different things.
One is that I had very little interest in finish. I had very little interest in the authority that these things were performing as like fine art things that -- why am I keep quoting? -- fine art things that were kind of professing their value as art objects. They became really representational to me of the way that something is asking a question or positing something rather than having this kind of fine, finished authority. And that was like this thing that I -- seemed like pathological on my part, like why don't I want to finish something, why am I not working on bronze.
And the other thing that was really interesting as I was doing this work was that everything had this kind of like what I call a bourge-scale that all felt quite bourgeois, like this is a thing that's a scale that you know, an
11-by-8 1/2 sheet of paper and it goes up on the wall like this and there's something like quite small and kind of like reasonable about this. It also has this kind of body relationship as well which I thought was funny; that there was almost this 1 to 1 in everything that I made. It was just like

small and like portable as opposed to doing something like this, which has a much more cumbersome kind of materiality to it and scale.
So this all -- that all led to this idea of like where do these things belong, which then made me realize that all of these things that I was making were, of course, like portable objects, almost like this woman, my Great Aunt
Eleanor, right, is keeping in this cabinet. So even though I wasn't thinking about this idea of like the collectible or the kind of 1-to-1 domestic scale, suddenly I was making decorative items for a domestic setting.
Which ironically ended up taking me back to this relational, right, vernacular where this thing is reminding me of a trip someplace, and this thing is just because I found it and I loved it. And this started making me think a lot about where as an artist who's not working in an institutional mode, right, and I'm also kind of outside of the gallery system as well, when
I'm in my studio, I'm unconsciously making things always for the home because the home is the thing that I know.
And this is both super depressing to me and it kind of -- like if you dig very deep, it seems like a kind of aspirational like short sidedness. Or you can read into whatever you want about that, at least on my part. But the thing that really excited me was the idea that decoration, for a really long time, and there's a lot written about decoration, but was kind of a bleak form of power, right; that you can demonstrate who you are or who you want to be through objects and through putting things together.
And so just from a feminist standpoint, it became this really interesting way for -- to take a lot of different -- to basically examine the work of women and the ways that women could kind of take what resources they had and in a lot of different ways kind of like construct these identities, aspirational or others, and also think about what was beautiful to them.
So this is a photo of a sharecropper's home that Walker Evans took. And in thinking and in looking at this, like the first glance is kind of about poverty, especially in comparison to this, this book. Which I'm laughing at because I stole it from this hotel that my parents were staying at, the book
I stole, because it was being used as a decorative prop, and it was actually a book that I check out a lot from the library, and I was so -- I was like so delighted by the perversity of this decorative book being used as a decorative object to like complete the authority of like what a bookshelf is supposed to look like that then I just put it in my bag because I knew no one cared. So I hope none of you own that hotel that I'm not going to name.
So the thing that interests me is this thinking, right, and this thinking and the ways that you use your resources -- I'm going to start crying -- the ways that we use our resources to make beauty. And in this construction of beauty or taste or whatever, who we want to be, there is a power when you don't have power.

And this is been a longstanding interest for me in terms of ways that we subvert slight authority or we subvert power using things like beauty or humor or the grotesqueness, like that we create these kind of new avenues for ourselves to have value.
So and then this interests me, too, this idea of the like marginally -- the like so highly tasteful that it almost becomes grotesque. Right? Yeah, I could talk about that picture a lot. We don't have that much time.
Okay. So in thinking about all of this, so making these things, I'm thinking about homes, I just had a kid, like I'm thinking about home a lot because I'm there a lot, I'm thinking about resources and I'm thinking about the ways that artists kind of use the resources that they have.
And there's a long history of people using their homes -- Klara is definitely one of them -- to create a space for artists to like exhibit their work.
What I was interested in is the expectation that you bring to the homes of other people and you judge what's in their home in a way that you don't feel like you're allowed to when you walk into the gallery.
There's a kind of very generous nonacademic quality to looking at an Airbnb.
And I thought this is where I'm going to do my next exhibition. Because when
I'm looking at an Airbnb, you're thinking about who you want to be maybe for the weekend and the kind of -- the experience of looking at the art on the walls or the bed or the view or this kind of photographed construction, right, of what your surroundings or this kind of immersive installation, right, that you're going to be inhabiting for just a night is a kind of exciting prospect and that you're actually using your own critical experience with looking and judging little signifiers, like, oh, man, this looks really dead to me, I don't want to be here, or, ooh, this looks very comfortable to me.
So I have a house. And I started thinking a lot about the refrigerator, right, as the kind of place that you evidence your life, like who you are and who you want to be and then also like not to forget your dental appointment and that there's a kind of unconscious gesture in all of that that is also very interesting in relation to the more kind of like genealogical pathology that I'm interested in.
And so what I did was I sent -- I took these photos of my home and then sent them to artists. So I kind of used this yellowed out thing in which to kind of capture people's imagination and be like, oh, art could go here, art could go here, and I gave them kind of this blank check to do whatever they wanted and then I would install it in my home.
So then I got a bunch of work shipped to me. I cleaned my house for once, and then I did like a nicer version of my house but still left these kind of like telling things that people like with kids who are looking at Airbnbs could kind of be like, oh, they have a home, or, oh, there's some books or

like places, right, that were strategically left as being lived in in the way that that other place, right, felt like anybody could live there.
So there's this kind of constructive quality of the gesture of the home. And then it was all uploaded onto Airbnb without anybody being told, and then we would construct these hilarious like rejections if anybody wanted to stay in the house, which was also really fun. But then like ha-ha, I'm having this show in my house and nobody knows. It's like genius, right? Like I'm never going to make any money ever. I have the most self-destructive tendencies.
That's another talk. So I then --
>>: [inaudible].
>> Dawn Cerny: Yeah. Oh, oh, this is it?
>>: Yeah, pretty much.
>> Dawn Cerny: Okay. And then I constructed -- that's good, because I'm done. And then I constructed this zine that went along with it so that I sent this zine out to people in my community, inviting them to come see the show. The only trick would be that I would never clean my house. So when they came to see it, the evidence of our everyday life was always put in position with whatever the thing was. So then it starts taking on this conversation about the stuff of life and the work. And this is a much longer -- well, thank you. You've all been so nice.
[applause]
>> John Boylan: We're bringing up Klara next. But the one thing I forgot to tell you is why these guys are here in the first place, and that is because studio99 sponsored the Visual Art Award for The Stranger Genius Awards for the last two years. And so this is pretty much the record of what these guys do. Anyway, back to Klara.
>> Klara Glosova: Hello. Good afternoon. And I want to say thank you to everybody, thank you to John Boylan, thanks to Microsoft and The Stranger for all of you to have us here. And I figured that the best way to -- probably the best way to start a talk is to bring up some dirty laundry.
So I'm one of those artists that works in a really chaotic way. And for years I was trying to explain it to myself, but I just realized it's pretty much just like life. It's not any different than that, especially those of you that may have family or children would know exactly what I mean.
So I -- this image is actually from a series of ceramic laundry that I created. And it grew out of -- it's pretty deceiving. It's not just laundry on the floor. It grew out of a frustrated situation on our bathroom floor, but also it led to my interest in entropy and the tendency of any given enclosed system to gravitate towards disorganized disorder. But eventually

it's supposed -- what's supposed to happen is like achieve a state of uniform chaos.
And I've -- well, I've had a lot of theories about this and made many simulations and experiments in my own way, in my own home. I work at home.
And unfortunately I was never able to finish those experiments with real laundry because not all members of our family were on board with letting it go that long so I can't -- I don't have the final data.
So here is the example of some ceramic laundry that I created and placed back on our bathroom floor. I've also found all of my work kind of -- I'm a mother and I work at home, so lot of my work looks through the things, through the -- I use domesticity as a lens, so I kind of look at the world through that lens often because that's what I have around me and that's what
I often notice most often in both positive and negative ways, lots of time with frustration that I then have to trace to things like that all the time, looking for socks.
I have two teenage boys, and they're playing -- they're really into soccer.
So this is a regular occurrence in our household, looking for soccer socks.
I've created this as an installation at Gallery 4Culture a couple years ago, and these are porcelain soccer socks. There's -- this was a whole another, I would say, more of a psychological experiment because people kept stepping on them and somehow found a way to blame me that it's my fault because they look real. So, anyway, I won't -- we don't have enough time to dissect that psychology.
This is another kind of series of works that led out of my frustration, trying to -- basically what I'm trying to be is be a good mom and also be an artist. And often the gap between the ideal word as an artist and my reality is really, really huge. Sometimes it's like Grand Canyon. And always trying to kind of reconcile that, like how come, for example, not only doing so much laundry but I'm also spending tons of time on a soccer field.
And, again, I had to find a way of turning the frustration around. And the way for me was I read in a magazine -- I read a quote that really resonated with me and I adopted it as my motto. It said be the best prisoner you can be. And so I kind of -- that afforded me enough of a change of perspective that I was able to see my life in a different way.
And I started observing basically the behavior that I was engaging in, and that led to this series of works that's called Life on the Sidelines. And the main focus of those works is there's really no soccer being played; it's all about the parents and observing the observer.
And that resulted in a series of large-scale watercolors that were exhibited at Bryan Ohno Gallery last year. And my idea behind creating this show was that each painting is like a movie screen, as a screen shot or a frame in one movie where nothing really changes, you just stand there for hours. The -- week after week, Saturday after Saturday, and Sunday, too. And the only

thing that's different is perhaps a parent shifting their weight from one foot to another. So, yeah, really exciting movie.
But, anyway, I wanted to bring that experience to the viewers. And the idea was that if you walked into the gallery, you would be basically inside that movie, inside that space where barely anything happens. I guess if you were into soccer, you could say that something's happening. But, I mean, I try --
I love my kids and I even like soccer, but I just don't love it enough, I guess, to be engaged that much.
I also made a series of ceramic sculptures, and this is for -- this is the team parent. It's a -- they're small little figurines, and I was thinking of kind of like the sports bobbleheads that are of sports players. But this is the -- there's 11 of them. There's usually 11 players on a soccer team. So it's a team parent representing.
Here's another detail of a painting from that series that actually I was very lucky because it was acquired by the Seattle Art Museum as part of Deed of
Gift, who is just incredibly generous gift and artistic intervention by
Jennifer Nemhauser and Matthew Offenbacher. And they -- it's part of -- it's hanging there as part of a collection and part of Rebel Rebel exhibition till
December -- I think December 13. And Dawn here has also work in there. So go check it out if you can.
Yeah, it's a ten-foot watercolor. So really if the SAM didn't get it, it would just -- I've never seen it actually from enough distance before they hung that piece over there because my studio is about that big.
And then this is kind of a jump to my newest work which is called Free
Couches Aprons. I know it's a leap and it's also required a leap of faith on my part when I embarked on this project. I started photographing old couches around the neighborhood that people leave out, and they were usually kind of, oh, sad looking, used, out there in the elements. And I started like feeling, feeling for them, but I really didn't know what to do and what's the purpose and why am I following this, why am I doing it.
I would say that it was different for me, this project, because oftentimes art making does require that leap of faith, but this time I wasn't even sure that it's art making, like it wasn't even -- the project was kind of its own thing, not even sure how to classify it.
Because like I had this idea to, of course, I'm taking pictures of couches,
I've got to make aprons out of it. Right? No, I didn't know why. I had no clue. It's just something that like, yeah, I got to do this.
And so I -- I made aprons. And throughout this project I'm kind of learning.
And if I backpedal, I can like look at it back and see where aprons -- how they figure out in my life and where are they coming from. But I didn't know that at the time. I usually -- because my studio is at home, I work at home, but I also have to do the laundry and do the dishes and I am the housewife.

So I have devised a system where I have two aprons for two different roles, for artist and housewife. The housewife is the -- I wear apron that's blue with polka dots kind of, and then I have bigger apron -- I have bigger apron that's red and really messy, and that's for art making. So there's nobody else around, it's just my own system of designating which role I'm functioning in currently.
So I made series of these aprons. There's even some LA couch and nice sectional sofa that I found on Beacon Hill. And I started wearing them around. And I also -- beside just -- you can only wear one, right, so I would have a bag -- I have a bag that I carry all the aprons with me wherever
I go. And I started asking people that seemed either that I knew them or that seemed nice and open-minded enough that they would possibly pose for me.
And at first I had no clue. And the images that came out were like, oh, okay, well, person in an apron. And what? And the moment when this actually -- the photographs became interesting to me was when I got a whole group of people to pose for me. When it was just -- it wasn't the one, but it was -- it became a lineup.
And the lineup reminded me a lot of like family reunion photographs where everybody lines up and smiles and hopes to be remembered that way, happy for eternity, forever. And so I started doing that. At the time this project was developing, I was heading out on two months' long trip to Europe. A month of it I spent in Czech Republic, which is my home country, and month of traveling around Europe.
So the aprons were packed and went with me everywhere I went. And what I did is trying to find situation when I can have people pose for me. It got a little tricky, like what I found, it needed -- for that moment to happen, I needed to have the right ingredients. Oftentimes I would have to have a few trusted friends or family or somebody I knew, and then it would have to be just kind of right time, right mood. Sometimes a little bit of alcohol that would help.
But it's just oftentimes when those things came together there was enough energy that complete stranger would join us. This is some of my high school, former high school schoolmates, and then complete strangers in a pub that just like, okay, we're doing this with you.
So I kept doing these photos, photographing people when I came back to
Seattle, so a lot of my friends from here, and a lot of friends -- or people that I've never met just volunteer.
There was something really gratifying about bringing this symbol, which I realize a symbol of like hidden labor and isolation out into a broad daylight, and also crazy nightlife, like it just was -- it felt really good personally to do that.

And there was another thing that when I came back to Seattle I was trying to figure out a way how to bring all those people that have volunteered for this project and pose for me on those travels all around Europe and everywhere, how to bring them back home with me. And I found a perfect opportunity to do that when I found this couch a few blocks down the street from our house.
And it was one of those moments, again, yeah, like ten o'clock, sitting on a couch with my husband, who thought he's done for the day, I'm like we got to go get that couch down the street.
So I -- we did. I brought it home. And I did a little magic, reupholstery work on it and brought those people basically wearing couch -- free aprons couches, ended up back on a couch, back on a street, just in time for this
NEPO 5k Don't Run, the final event that I have organized and co-curated for the last five years. It's a big city-wide art walk or art event with about
50, 60 projects each year. So this became one of the projects on the route.
And it felt -- for me it felt like the cycle, the circle was complete, and it was. Like it felt that was it.
But I want to say that the project isn't complete. There has been this parallel line of thinking in my head about it that really had me think and examine my value and value system in general. And I basically struggled to answer two basic questions, which is what -- where did the aprons belong and what is their value.
There's a lot of people that throughout this project would ask me where they can buy them and how much they are. And I realized they can easily be marketed as a wearable object, and if I was a businessman, woman, I could make it into some kind of -- yeah, I could sell aprons with couches on it or -- but I'm not. So it's never been my mode of working.
So the other option was that coming more from the gallery people and art world was they could be deemed piece of artwork, they're special, I sew them myself, I'll learn how to sew for this purpose. And their price tag would be a lot higher. And I was just -- couldn't decide. I was waffling between the two options. None of them felt right.
And I realized that I don't want just few special people to have them. I also don't want to go into some production. And so I realize that I have to find a third way, and that because they came out of generosity and good humor and free couches on a street that they need to go back into the world, for sure, and I'll be making more of them, but that they need to go free, that they need to be -- I will be making them and they will be free for the recipients. And, yeah, and they will be made with love and everything and with -- I put all my effort into it.
I know it sounds maybe idealistic and really altruistic, but there's other things that I want to get out of it for myself I realized, and that is that I want to create a whole new -- I mean, nothing less than I want to create a whole new economic value system, because I feel like the system that we live in is insufficient and somehow I want to find a thread to work towards a

system that values -- that's based on trust and values, care, and respects labor, whether it's productive or not.
So I'll let you know how that goes. And that's it. If you want to pose in an apron, they're here, so find me after the talk.
[applause]
>> Klara Glosova: Okay. Mary Ann.
>> Mary Ann Peters: Thank you, guys, for coming and for inviting me. And I want to start by thanking, of course, The Stranger for nominating me for this award, which is the most confusing and also wonderful thing I've received.
And to thank Microsoft for inviting me.
And The Stranger asked me if I would explain my acceptance speech. And so
I'm going to do that first, and then I'm going to talk to you about my work.
What I said was if genius is perseverance and blind faith and -- if genius is perseverance and blind faith and sharing what you know and mentoring people who are generating ideas that you may never understanding, then I can sit with being a genius.
I don't believe in any way, shape, or form that I have more prowess or intellect or talent than the other two woman that were nominated for the award, or for any other artist in the area that might be nominated for such an award. And I felt that it was more that I explain my own way of moving in the world and my own ability to have the courage to work as an artist.
So perseverance is I've been working for 35 years as an artist, and blind faith is just a belief that that's a worthwhile task. And sharing what I know, I've done a lot of things in this town. I've founded studios, I've founded contemporary art centers, I've worked on First Amendment rights in the arts for a decade. I've done a lot of things that's worth sharing that information with somebody else. It doesn't make sense to go to my grave not having told people what I've done.
And finally it's really important to mentor a generation of artists that are behind me because they are indeed entertaining ideas and ethics and approaches to some sort of aesthetic notion that I may never be able to wrap my mind around. And I want to make sure that I honor them with this award, and that's why I said that.
I also said that I was going to buy lots of airplane tickets, lots of airplane tickets. And I said that I was going to buy airplane tickets to places that the government doesn't want me to go. At any given time there are travel alerts from our country for just about every planet -- every place on the planet that we should not go there.
I was an exchange student in college in Pakistan, and I travelled over land from Turkey through Iran and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Nepal. And I've

gone to North Africa, and I've spent many, many, many weeks in Central
America and in Mexico. Obviously I don't buy new washing machines; I buy airplane tickets.
But the importance of that comment is that we as Americans, who have the most privilege in the world, need to be in the world as we sit. We need to be in the world as active citizens and concerned citizens for the way that other people in the world live their lives. And the only way they're going to know that is if we go there.
So that's my desire to use this money that was given to me as a way to go and experience parts of the world that I want to see or have already seen and need to revisit. And most of them -- most of those choices are going to be probably aligned with cultures that the government has now in some ways targeted as not to our best advantage.
And I just wanted to say that out loud in an award because it made sense to me again, I had this huge audience, and we are being programmed to be afraid of the world that we live in. And I don't want that to happen. I want people to get on airplanes.
And finally the last thing that I did was I said that I was going to share this money with Dawn and Klara, which apparently was a radical thing to do.
I don't -- it doesn't -- I don't understand it. But this was free money to me. It was free money acknowledging my efforts, and it didn't make sense to me to differentiate myself from the two of them.
I'd said that I was not in competition with them, I was in concert with them.
And we've laughed a little bit about it because I failed to calculate that I have to pay taxes on this gift. So the amount that I'm giving them shrunk slightly. But I am indeed giving them some of the money.
And I think that's another kind of leading by example hopefully to say that I have enough. I don't have a lot, but I have enough. And hopefully I'll be able to make the work that I want to make and see the things I want to see.
So the other reactions to the award have been -- actually, this is a little bit humorous, too. It's like, gosh, Mary Ann, a woman of your -- how shall we say? -- of your age -- people have tried so many ways of saying you're not a young artist, you're somebody who's been at it awhile and they gave you this award. What's up, you know? And I'd have to say that what's up is just respect.
And the other thing is where do I want to go? You know? Well, I definitely want to go back to Lebanon. I -- and that's where I'm going to start my slideshow. My family is of Arab descent. My family is Lebanese. They were probably Syrians originally because they immigrated to this country at the turn of the 20th century and there was no Lebanon. But the area that they lived in was called Mount Lebanon, so they always identified as being
Lebanese. And that's my cultural affection, is to the Lebanese.

In 2010 I went to Lebanon and to Damascus with my brother and sister, and after that was what we now describe as the Arab Spring and the unfortunate collapsed Arab Spring. And it really opened up for me a topic that had been in my work and in my concerns for a very, very long time. But I just had not found a platform or a venue or, in truth, the support, the emotional and intellectual support to pursue work of that ilk. And now somebody's opened the floodgates.
But I wanted to show you this piece. This is based on a letter that my grandfather wrote to my father that, in essence, said I'm so happy that you got to go off to college. My dad was given a scholarship to Yale, and he met a man there who happened to be from the area and in Lebanon that his family was from. And so my grandfather reminisces in the letter about how glad he is that he actually got to meet somebody who understood that culture.
And at the end of the letter he said I know you might need money and do you need clean shirts, but please find the Syrian boys. And so what he was actually saying was please find the community that has nurtured you and the culture that has nurtured you. I don't want you to lose it by assimilating.
So I found that letter and made this small 20-foot-long drawing for my father. In 1992 I made this drawing. It's massive and it's in a heap in my studio, but I hang onto it.
And this is a detail. And I took basically names -- I anglicized my grandparents' name. They came on a ship, the men came on a ship, the women came later. This is the Saint of Music. My family since for fun. And I used this honeycomb patterning. And I know you will see it again because the bee system is a perfect system, and I think that that's something we aspire to, is to be participants in a perfect system, be it your social, personal, spiritual lives.
Then I put it into an installation at the Bellevue Art Museum. This was called Find the Syrian Boys as well. And it was this table made out of honeycomb aluminum that was held up by an uprooted tree, which was symbolic for a family tree. And there were names that were all around the room. And those names corresponded to my father and his family.
And this is an example of it. My father's name was Shafi [phonetic], and everybody called him Pete because my last name was Peters. Although that's an anglicized version of Butres [phonetic], which means House of Peter. And what you can't see in the bigger images is that I built the walls at a slight slant and put a water system behind them so in intervals the walls tear up and weep. And you would smell the dirt, you could smell the mud. And so that was that piece. And it spawned, 20 years later, this body of work.
This is a very -- this is a drawing. It's actually a small drawing. But it's called Mirage. And it's sort of the precursor for trying to map my way towards a cultural tie that I can actually illuminate in my work and not seem

like I'm taking advantage of a topic that is really, really volatile and concerning for a lot of people, and that's what's going on in the Middle
East. And I can't elaborate on these things.
This is -- it's called Last Cedar. Lebanon is known for its cedar trees, but those trees are mostly gone due to degradation and war, and I just wanted to make a piece that was about that. Then I started sourcing images off the
Web. I received a grant in 2014 from an organization called Art Matters, and they allowed me to do research in Paris and in Mexico City following a migration out of the Middle East through what was Europe and into the
Americas at the turn of the 20th century. This is all on the heels of the
Ottoman Empire.
And I was comparing those documents to the way that people are using their phones today to basically inform us of what's going on in all these various communities. And this happened to be a pro Assad rally in Damascus. And then I made my own interpretation of it, which was called My Father's Father.
People don't understand in many ways what -- some of the most beautiful ethics of Islamic life, and one of those can be that you -- your father and my father might have been enemies or they might have been friends. But if you are in need, I'm going to take you into my home. There is this notion of propriety of histories but also not being dismissive to somebody's circumstances in the moment.
And I think as our media toys with how they think about the Islamic world and how to speak to it, they continuously, I believe, turn it on its ear and make it constantly a demonic thing. And it's not a demonic thing. I've had really nothing but incredible experiences in Islamic countries. So that's where that came from.
There's also a story that I found around -- in 1982 the father of the current
Assad, his father, bombed a town called Hama. And Hama is a famous, famous site. It's a historical site. It's surrounded by a viaduct system that has all these churning waterwheels that was part of a way to irrigate the land around the city. It has a river that runs through the middle of it.
And I learned that there was -- at that time when that bombing happened, of course, the country was shut down and all information was shut down, but close to 20,000 people were killed. And so I decided I was going to make my own homage to those people when I learned that they, on about a yearly basis, come to the river and pour red dye into the river at the viaduct turnstiles, at these waterwheels and it turns the river red.
So I made a piece called Painting the River Red. And this is about the right scale of it. That's the scale of it. And I did not go there, but I felt like it was important for me to make some sort of gesture towards that historical event. And this is a detail. And to be able to in some ways, with my work, hopefully spark curiosity from other people for a part of the world that they may never be able to see.

I also did a piece recently. In the last year I made this piece. It's called What Stays the Same is Never So, which is my motto now for history.
Just when you think you understand what's going on, there's something that's volatile and changing. And I use the symbol of a web, a spiderweb, which was at my home. I took a photograph of this spiderweb, and then I drew over it eight times in a little bit of a different way. So as we speak, there's some aspect of what we presume to be the truth that is now in a state of flux and we can't hang onto it, we have to move with it.
This is a piece called -- what is the name of this piece? It's -- oh, I'm just blanking on the name all of a sudden. But it references -- oh, it's called No Man's Land. It references a section between Lebanon and Syria that is indeed a no man's land, which is identified as a pocket or a slice of territory that's somewhat neutralized so that neither country actually owns it but both countries can access it. And so it's this place where everybody sort of takes a breather between whatever their differences are on either side.
There are no man's lands all over the world. That term comes from the first
World War, which was this kind of neutral -- or neutered zone. And I made this up. I made up these drawings, but I also have seen them, if that makes sense.
So what I'm doing with my work is not -- there's no point in me making exactly what was there because you can see it in a photograph. It makes more sense for me to give you the quality of the site and to somehow, again, jump start for you a curiosity about it. This is also just about to scale.
The refugee debacle that is going on in the world today is not new, and it's been going on for a long time. And this is another image that I found off the Web. And I made my own painting about it, which was this, which is I wanted people to understand that even as we're collecting people in these circumstances, they are there out of strife and they're not there because they want a new camping trip. And it's a very isolating experience as well as a needed community-oriented experience.
And these pieces were called Storyboard, similar to I think Dawn mentioned storyboards, they're a way of compiling a variety of images to make a fuller history of something. And so that is one of the storyboards. This is another one that's a pastiche of images that I was pulling, again, off the
Web but I -- what I wanted to do was in some ways to make an image that was referential to -- to the explosive nature of things and to the actual explosive occurrence of things in these towns. And this is just a street scene that was seen from the air and that I invented off of it. So I kind of sandwiched together a variety of images.
This was in a marketplace in Iraq. And I just thought it was an incredibly beautiful image, even though it's a very cataclysmic moment of a bomb going off in the marketplace. And then I made my own piece about it.

I don't on a regular basis -- I also brought a catalog for you to see to -- what I'm most known for is -- frankly, for abstract painting, but my work is always referenced to real events and I'm only now kind of giving them their own life in a much more, I guess you'd have to say, narrative way that's recognizable.
And I think that that's important in this moment. This was a very, very beautiful, serene image of a woman walking by a pool. And I just wanted you to be able to have a sense of calm even when we are observing or being forced to observe war zones, there's always a place of calm, there's some way that people are going about their lives in a regular way.
And we as -- again, as citizens who are partial -- while we are complicitous in that because our government and our taxes are using their resources to continue this, to propagate this, we have to take in mind that people are trying to live just a normal life.
This was a piece that I made because I just couldn't resist. It's a big painting. It's larger than this. It's called Messy Heaven. And I just started thinking about all the things that are being done in the name of some sort of elevated good, be it an über Christian or über Islamic person or whatever, we're doing these things because there's some notion that there's a higher order and that we will have the privilege of participating in it. And
I just thought: You know what? It's going to be messy as all get-out. If you believe in a heaven, it's going to be one sloppy joint. And so that's -- that's why I made this piece called Messy Heaven.
This piece, again, I have -- I have a nice hand. I'm known for being able to make beautiful things, which I take seriously. If my hand can transfer again the logic of being a commentator in a lot of different ways, then I want to do that. And so this piece is called What Remains. There's a lot of architectural sites that are in the news because we are destroying them, they're being destroyed, but they're also leaving remnants that are equally beautiful, and somebody will come on to those.
And so in this case it was sort of referencing the tile work that I had seen in many, many parts of the world. And I made this image up. I didn't like, you know, I'm making this stuff up. In Mexico City I met a man who had immigrated there. This is part of my grant. And his family did an entirely different job in Lebanon. But when he was leaving, his father said to him:
Learn how to make bread. If you can make bread, you can eat it, you can sell it, and you can share it.
So with one simple item you can make yourself -- I guess you would have to say you can make yourself comfortable in a world that's not your own. And I just was moved by it. And I started making these pieces called Impossible
Monuments. And this is one of them. I took pita breads and I had them bronzed. Impossible monuments for my definition are those things that are in the everyday or that have some sort of mundane aspect to them but because

they're so integral to life they deserve to be elevated to the status of the monument; in this case, bread.
And that moves me into this piece. This is the backdrop to a piece that I did called The World is a Garden. I found a quote from a 14th century
Tunisian author that said -- he was a philosopher that said the world is a garden, the walls are the state. And I just dropped the walls are the state, and I'm letting you see my sneaky little piece which looked like this.
And it was off in a room in my gallery. And what happened is every time you moved your perspective on that garden shifted with you. And it works in reverse. You think that as you get closer you'll be able to see it better.
But when you get closer, everything shrinks and you can't see it hardly at all. But when you back up, you can see the whole thing. So that's that piece.
Last summer I was invited to do a piece for an exhibition called Out of Sight which coincided with the big Seattle Art Fair. And, again, thinking about the Middle East and -- you know, I want to say right out the gate, there's no such thing as the Middle East. That's a term that was invented and that we've just normalized. So just -- that's something to look up later. But every time I say it, I think I'm propagating a lie, but not really. It's just something that we're comfortable with.
And I wanted to make a piece that referenced again bread because another part of what's happened in Syria and most obviously but in other places in the region, in the Levant is that there is a drought. There is a serious drought. And a lot of what happened in Syria was that the farmers, the agrarian societies had to adapt to a circumstance that they could not maintain because there was no water. So they went to urban settings, and in the urban cities the infrastructure of the country was unable to take care of them and then -- and also was unresponsive entirely to the requests for help.
And so I made this ornamental rug, which is kind of almost a cliche, but I think a really beautiful reference to that part of the world, and I made it out of baking flour. It is indeed just flour. And when you step on it, it just dissolves and dissipates and that will be the end of it. And this is some details of it. I made this up. It just kind of came to be and -- back up -- and -- whoops. I guess I can't go back.
And so I'll end with telling you what I'm making for an exhibition that coincides with the Genius Award. It will be at the Frye. My piece will be installed next week. Contrary to everybody else, I've had about 32 seconds to come up with something. But I had been thinking about, of course, all of us are concerned about all these people that are trying to get themselves out of war-torn areas and get themselves into safety.
So my piece is going to be a reference to the refugees moving across the
Mediterranean. It has a nautical component to it. It is imagining a fisherman who trolls his net and what gets pulled up into the net.

It also coincides with an article that I read about what refugees pack. And one of the things that they pack, of course, oftentimes is something for worship, you know, worry beads or prayer beads or whatever; their identification papers; safety blankets; and finally -- and my -- what's got me hooked, which is the way I think; I try to find something that seems to be obscure but really integral -- is they take lemons.
They take lemons to smell the lemons to offset being seasick. And if you suck on a lemon, it can also suppress your hunger. So this very simple and ubiquitous item, a lemon, which is also an important ingredient in that part of the world's cuisine, is taken along. And it's a very, very hopeful thing that in some cases works and in other cases doesn't.
So thank you so much for letting me tell you these stories. And, you know, I don't know that I'll always be making work that is so specific like this, but
I feel it's important to make it now. And thank you.
[applause]
>> John Boylan: We have some time for questions, if anybody has any.
>>: How'd you make the flour rug? It's so huge. How did you make it?
>> Mary Ann Peters: I made it by taking -- I calculated how much room that I wanted it, how big I wanted it to be, and I wanted it to be somewhat large and a little bit oversized. And then I -- with my studio assistant, McKenzie
Porritt, who's also an artist, she did it with me, we had -- we set apart about two feet at a time.
I collect all these doilies and templates and tattering things, and so I was calculating to size how far can we reach and also what the pattern would be.
So I was making it up. I literally was making it up. I knew that it had to have a center section that was large and much more ornamental in its scale.
But everything else had to be the kind of bordering.
So we worked ourselves up the front, down the sides, left it open in the middle, stretched in the middle, laid down the templates. And what I would do is I would take flour and just pile it up. And I had the same depth as a piece of drywall. That's what I was using to cordon it off. And so I would press it into place.
And it looked like plaster. People thought it was plaster. But, in fact, one man in a blind moment on his phone stepped into it [inaudible] in that one place. So it was quite clear that it's -- that it's not -- it's not solid. And it wasn't intended to be solid. It was intended to be temporary.
>>: Did you leave the footprint?

>> Mary Ann Peters: I did take some photographs and then we repaired it.
And then at the very end somebody asked us how we were going to remove it.
And we just walked across it and then scooped it up and took it in bags to the dumpster.
>>: When you were moving it, was it hard for you to like say good-bye to it, or was it a part of your like your process to like you almost enjoyed watching it?
>> Mary Ann Peters: You know, I think -- I loved making it. I loved the opportunity of making it. It had been in my mind, and I just thought -- I -- it might seem like I've had this gigundis career, which I have, but I haven't been given -- I haven't used traditional venues in the way that someone might imagine.
So I'm not on the big name list of the curators in town. I don't -- I'm not in the museums. I've sort of been kind of sliding by. And so in this case it was in this warehouse -- or in the top floor of the King Street Station, and I couldn't leave it there. I had to take it down. They asked me to leave it a lot longer, but I just thought, you know, that's -- the point is that people understand that this commodity is at risk in a part of the world that needs it, and as do we all. So yes.
>>: [inaudible]
>> Mary Ann Peters: Do you want these guys up here too?
>>: Oh. I have questions for everyone.
>> Mary Ann Peters: Okay.
>>: You mentioned that a lot of your work is abstract work, and I've seen some of that work, but that you also have some figurative pieces that have more narrative content. And my question is when you are making the abstract works, did you still have the figure in your mind, or do you find that you have two different modes of thinking and working from the abstract works to the figural works, or that they're both two sides of the same?
>> Mary Ann Peters: Well, you know, I've also, again, used reference to real events or real places and -- but I probably didn't have the same kind of courage about it as I do now to make them be more literal in their appearance. And I think also that I -- I am classically trained, and so I've learned early on how to use figurative components to make my work. And I always use them as a reference point.
But mostly I just invent as I go along. I don't take notes. I don't have notebooks. I just hit the ground running. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But they're kind of simultaneous, I'd have to say. I feel fortunate, I feel really fortunate that I've gone in and out of the gallery world and been able to experiment in a variety of ways for making

public art projects to installation pieces to intimate little tiny things because you need -- all artists are mining a certain kind of vocabulary that they can activate in a variety of ways should the opportunity hit. And that's I think where the three of us have been fortunate, that we have those skills. Yes.
>>: So in -- in like the -- I guess in your pieces you're doing which are more literal art, right, you're delving into your heritage, your family, et cetera, it seemed very personal. When you're making these pieces, do you feel you're actually exploring -- there's an actual vulnerability there? And while you're making it, does that affect how you do it, you think how other respond to this, how other people [inaudible]?
>> Mary Ann Peters: Yes. It took me a long time to make this work because I didn't feel like I was actually privileged to make it. I felt that there are people who are in those countries or who are first-generation Arab Americans who have a much more closer finger on the pulse.
And then I met a man named Rabih Mroué who's a Lebanese artist who's been making work about what was going on in Syria. And I said, Did you go there?
And he said, No, I can't go there. And it occurred to me that, oh, wait a minute, he's just being a commentator because he's interested.
And so, yes, I feel my family ties. I feel that -- frankly, that one of the last closeted communities in America are people of Arab descent. It's not to your advantage to kind of broadcast your affiliations because it can be so misunderstood. And I just feel like it's my responsibility at this point in my life to articulate this if I can. But my parents would be proud of me.
They are no longer living. They wouldn't get it at all. You know, they wouldn't, I'm sure.
>>: So what you're doing is expressing your culture and the roots around it.
At what point does it become appropriation, it's not your culture, and how do you feel about the rightness of doing that artwork?
>> Mary Ann Peters: No, that's the topic. That's definitely the topic, is when are you being -- appropriating something that is actually not your purview. And for me I feel like I'm -- it's -- ultimately the most important part of the work is that it's honest, that it's clear and it's honest to my particular ethic and my concern about the topic.
And when I'm just doing it as something to in some ways just expand the capacity of my work, then that's -- that's going to be a red flag for me. So
I think about that. And that's why it took me so long to be so clear about it.
And I know that there are many, many other artists who are much more capable of describing these experiences than I am, but I -- I -- I'm kind of a stealth artist in this respect. I'm using other kinds of seductions to bring people into the work. Like I really believe that beauty is a source of

seduction to get people to think about things that they may not really want to think about. And I use it. I admit to that. But I do think about the importance of not appropriating and being clear that that's not case.
That's why I'm not copying the photographs. I'm basically a translator of events. And I hope I'm doing a good job. I'm pretty nervous about the one
I'm making right now because it's pretty literal. You're not going to be able to get around it. But it will be beautiful, too. I hope.
>> John Boylan: So anyone else?
>>: I had a question for Dawn. I was wondering what the [inaudible] how far are you willing to go with that, like I think it would be really interesting to just turn over that space [inaudible] your space, your personal home space and be really completely redesigned and then have to live in that [inaudible] wondering if you thought about --
>> Dawn Cerny: Yes. And I'm also -- I mean, it's -- it's -- I was also working in parallel with another artist, Rob Rhee, so we had decided on this strategy. And his project was an actual Airbnb that we coauthored at first, and the question is how alienating do you make the experience of hosting somebody be, right, like is it going to be like a really like Beetlejuice, right, like it's a very creepy, cold house.
So we came up with some strategies for that so people actually could stay in it in a more overly designed space. But, yeah, this question of how much -- what that line is, who the audience is, is really interesting.
And the project that I'm working on right now with Amanda Donnan and Rob Rhee at Seattle University is the kind of slice of it, which is artists giving work. And then at Seattle University at the Hedreen Gallery we've created a library where staff, faculty, and students can check our work. So the risk exists right with the artists giving this work and the risk of taking responsibility for work and then how that work changes as its being documented in people's homes.
So that's -- it is. It's a question of strangers -- and it also makes me wonder like at what point do I just decide to be like an interior designer.
What is that --
>>: [inaudible] is the fact that you're doing it in the space that you're living in.
>> Dawn Cerny: Right, right.
>>: Which is the design that you might have for the Airbnb actually might be very much in conflict with the design that you need to live with.
>> Dawn Cerny: Exactly. So that that idea of inviting a curator in or somebody who has like an aesthetic like I've been terrified of and what that

negotiation is, but then also this is kind of like [inaudible] like, oh, this is what it's like to be wealthy where you can just work with artists and then they like do things in your home and you get to experience that. But I'm just doing it through networks of friendships and community, the people I know.
But it is -- we had this one that was up -- this really, really expensive print that was up on our refrigerator, and this artist had made these custom magnets, and we were just freaking out the whole time because [inaudible]
$5,000 [inaudible] out of our microwave all the time. So we were really happy when that piece came down. But it is something so like how is this different than any of our houses, right? Like we can all do this. Artists have stuff that they want to get out [inaudible].
>> Klara Glosova: I have experience with this scenario. And there wasn't enough time to talk about it, but the [inaudible] actually put a lot of projects that I had in my home on Beacon Hill, and they kind of gradually -- well, actually very quickly took over our house. Within a year we had a multimedia [inaudible] three artists, moving furniture [inaudible].
>> Dawn Cerny: In like an opening, like a party.
>> Klara Glosova: Yes. Yeah. We had [inaudible].
>>: Can you talk more about using the Airbnb infrastructure to do your own art games that people might necessarily not know, and are there other kind of new technology frontiers where you're putting your art jokes out there for the masses?
>> Dawn Cerny: Yeah. But it's not for the masses, it's only for me, right?
I know that's kind of -- I'm not like look at this art thing we did on
Airbnb. You guys know and 30 other people know. I know, it's a kind of covert -- it's like subverting expectations, like using that but never figuring out what that line with the audience is. Because I'm just taking advantage of like the quality of how you look for something with a really specific expectation.
I worked at Restoration Hardware in college, too, and I would do a lot of drawings and letter-pressed stuff that as we took things out of the old packages and put them into the Restoration Hardware package, I would put these text-based works that said like this costs more than you think it did, which they never knew about. But those strategies of like using your everyday life and labor in this way to kind of like call into question something in really sly ways.
I mean, even when we thought about what that text would be for the Airbnb, like what are the trigger things that make people think that it's a joke or not. But it does make me question now every time I look at Airbnb, you know, you'll see them occasionally, like they're so trashy or like so tragic that

no one would ever sleep there, and that makes me feel like it's some sort of a joke.
But, yeah, I think using digital expectations is kind of interesting. It will be kind of interesting to see how that -- how -- how people exploit new technologies. And I certainly have really enjoyed certain kinds of apps and exploiting it for my own purposes.
But it's the critical framework of the audience that's more of a question to me, like how do you define these things as a success, how do you define them as a failure. And certainly with this set of works that I do, it's more like it's a success if people participate in some way. Yeah, it's curious.
>> John Boylan: So I think one more question, and then we'll wrap up. I know you -- you look fiercely desirous of asking one.
>>: So in your idea of the house as gallery, it seems that pretty immediately it was clear that your choreography and like your mannerisms around your own home change once the incorporation of these really pricey, very valuable, like both monetarily and also just aesthetically pieces of artwork in your home, and so your movements kind of take on -- well, I wonder, I would have loved to see film --
>> Dawn Cerny: No, they didn't. It was terrible.
>>: No?
>> Dawn Cerny: No. Because then you're just like you don't -- the work becomes invisible. Right? And so if you think of it and you're like, oh, shit, I need to pack lunch [inaudible] pay the bill, then you take the chili out in a very different way, right, than if it's Sunday. Right? So that's also something that I was interested in, these kind of value systems of like at first like, oh, no, we can't put the dirty socks next to the sculpture.
And then by the end there's like a puddle of honey next -- you know, like that -- that -- that -- and that's me, that's my behavior. Somebody else would be very different. But the kind of -- the creepiness for me is like how dirty and gross and piled everything was but then around two weeks everything, all those stacks and articles and books and like all that stuff came back.
>> John Boylan: Okay. On that note, thank you, guys. Give them a hand.
[applause]