Ed Kerns

“Ed Kerns’ roots are perhaps in Lyrical Abstractionist soil, but the flower of his painting is another matter entirely. Kerns reaches back to fifties Action Painting for his ‘look’, then excises its professed psychological content simply by exaggerating it. The result is a kind of Mardi Gras Abstract Expressionism the values of which are purely stylistic, the implicit anguish of content having been made so explicit as to make these pictures look good enough to eat.”

-Gerrit Henry, Art International, January 20, 1972

Hear the Words of the Poet, Tagore’

“Death belongs to life as birth does. The walk is in the raising of the fort, as in the layering of it down.

The water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark. The small truth has words that are clear; the great truth has silence.”

***

A poem that inspired Kerns during this period of time in his life.

“Ed Kerns’ new paintings are like ruins of paintings, jury-rigged so as to be presentable. I do not mean this pejoratively. Layers of disguised imagery show through the surfaces, layers of fabric which have been gashed in places, and then sewn back together with crude wide stitches. Pocked, stained, gouged and otherwise damaged, these works recall rooms with crumbling plaster, patinas of paint on archaic machinery, and old frescoes badly restored”

-Leo Rubinfien, ArtFormum, January 1978

“Kerns paintings are canvases attached to irregular plywood shapes, although in all of these works there’s enough of the rectangle preserved to give a sense of forms breaking away from their confines. Kerns draws on the synthetic cubism of Picasso and Braque. His paintings are composed of simple geometric shapes that seem to overlap in layers like a collage.”

-John Zeaman, The Bergen Record, November 1989

“Kerns favors a palette of subtly modulated earth colors — rust, terra cotta, ivory, red and black — whose luminous austerity counterpoints the uncommonly rich surface of his labor-intensive art. The taut equipoise between Kerns’ geometric severity and his remarkably tactile surface proves that opposites not only attract; the also enhance each other.”

-Robert S. Mattison, M-13 Gallery Catalogue, January 1994

“His recent paintings are significant departures from his previous ouvre of the topographical, archeological, and sacrified paintings from the eighties and nineties; images which had as their essence the human hand laboring against the inevitable dark. The new images reveal a less inflicting subjectivity, a hand which reveals rather than inscribes. In the creation of the new images, Kerns likes to see himself “as the condition rather than the maker.” Consequently, the images are deeply mysterious, concurrently minute and expansive, employing the overlapping visual symbologies of the biological and cosmic".”

-Ross Gay, Banana Factory Gallery Exhibitions. October 2005

Frankenstein 2029 is a multi-media experience melding visual art, theater, music, dance, and film produced by the collaborative efforts of over eighty students, teachers, administration, staff, and alumni at Lafayette College in Easton, PA. Based on and inspired by Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein 2029 reaches both backwards and forwards in time, combining visual and thematic elements from the 1800s and a projected time in our not-so-distant future of the year 2029

Addressing ideas of consciousness, transhumanism, and biotechnological advance, the performance takes place over eight distinct venues spanning the arts campus. Between Mary Shelley's Geneva apartment, the laboratory of the 21st century Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the arctic-bound ship from which 19th century Frankenstein writes his letters, and more, the actors play their parts continuously as the audience decides where to go next in this build-you-own adventure experience. With various characters including scientists, forest creatures, transhuman monsters, and sparkling neurons wandering around from one venue to the next, chance meetings of characters and audience occur creating spontaneous interactions. 

Complete with fictitious Twitter accounts and a website created for the modern day Dr. Frankenstein's company ('Victor Neurotech', boasting a speciality in 'smart tattoos' that integrate digital information into the body), Frankenstein 2029 is full of strange yet sensical tangents (including the audience requirement to wear hospital-masks for 'protection') that add layer after layer to the performance experience. Combined with 'protestors' holding signs outside of the college with slogans like "Humans NOT Machines," "I lost my job because I don't have an upgrade," and "Society Against Victor Neurotech," Frankenstein 2029 has a War of the Worlds quality, where the fiction presented blurs into a tangible reality that feels closer than just out of reach. 

The brainchild of arts professor Ed Kerns and theater professor Suzanne Westfall, Frankenstein 2029 is a wonderfully wild testament to cross-disciplinary collaboration and inventive pedagogy. 

Julia Buntaine, Editor-in-Chief at SciArt Magazine. April 2015

Ed Kerns has been exploring levels of consciousness for years and using layers of paint to create an abstract understanding of awareness. His Octopus Meditations exhibition, which opens at 6 p.m. on April 7 at Brick and Mortar Gallery in Easton, Pa., is another manifestation of his perception of consciousness.

​Paintings from the series have been selected by Lafayette College’s biology department for permanent display in the $75 million Rockwell Integrated Sciences Center (RISC). Kerns’ work will be an appropriate complement to the RISC, which will be home to programs in biology, computer science, and environmental science and studies, house the IDEAL Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Daniel and Heidi Hanson ’91 Center for Inclusive STEM Education, as well as provide additional space for neuroscience.

Kerns, Clapp Professor of Art at Lafayette College, was inspired by computer engineer Bernardo Kastrup’s article in Scientific American about levels of consciousness, Sy Montgomery’s book The Soul of an Octopus, and numerous collaborations with neuroscientists and biologists over his 45-year career.

​​​“It’s something I have been thinking about for years in visual collaborative work with neuroscientists, computer scientists, and biologists,” Kerns says. “In the article Kastrup said ‘mechanisms of metacognition are entirely unrelated to the problem of how the qualities of experience could arise from physical arrangement.’”

​“I think and model subjective experience with paint, and a layered approach is what I use,” Kerns says. “Enter the mimic octopus - a creature that can change shape and color at will. What a treat to contemplate how that might work or look.”

The series "Octopus Meditations" is another manifestation of consciousness, he says.

​“I wondered what octopus consciousness might look like,” Kerns says. “It’s sort of a silly question, but it’s really about a synthetic idea that a person in a meditative state might reflect on.

​​​“They are brilliant. They have nine brains and an integrated network, which presupposes a different kind of awareness or consciousness. Humans have a central processing unit with the brain and neurons intimately connected with our body.”

Kerns says everyone knows that cortisol and stress cause things to happen or that we can shut down very easily if too much stimulation goes to the central processing unit.​​

“An octopus can handle things locally,” he says. “There is a little brain at the top of each of the tentacles. As invertebrates, they have all this surface area from which they can receive telemetry and not shut down.”

“Their perception of the world, however, is likely to be very different from ours given the distinctive organization of their nervous system,” says Elaine Reynolds, associate professor of biology. Kerns “perceives a rich tactile topography of movement and superposition, along with familiar visual patterns of symmetry, bubbles, and cells, representing the physical basis of all matter.” ​Kerns’ art envisions it through an imaginary world.

“So I’ve been working on what consciousness means,” he says. “Not what goes on when we think, but what it really means. I read a story once about Jonas Salk, who invented the polio vaccine. He was riding in the back of a taxi cab and got an idea of how to defeat the virus by imagining he himself was the virus and could figure out a way to kill himself. If you were a scientist today applying for a grant from other scientists, you probably wouldn’t get it if you talked like that.”“So the octopus lives in this fluid environment with this loose skin, and they have all these perceptual characteristics,” he adds. “So I wonder and think about that idea and make visual systems seeing what emerges and build complex imagery. I’ve been working on this idea for 15-18 years, painting new worlds.”

“I love calamari, but I don’t eat it anymore because I have come to know octopuses,” Kerns says.

-Brian Hay, Lafayette College Communications Division. April 2018