This page is no longer being updated and remains online for informational and historical purposes only. The information is accurate as of the last page update.
For questions about page contents, contact the Communications Division.
“Sound Layers in Blue: An Interdisciplinary Evening of Arts” will feature a lecture by Ed Kerns, Clapp Professor of Art and director of the Williams Visual Arts Building, at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 8, at the Banana Factory’s Binney and Smith Gallery, 25 W. Third St., Bethlehem.
The event will also feature poetry and music performed by Tom DiGiovanni ’96, Ross Gay ’96, and Alexis Siemons ’05, former students of Kerns’ with whom he has collaborated on creative projects combining art, poetry, and music.
An exhibit of new paintings by Kerns is on display at the gallery through Nov. 27. The gallery’s hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily.
An internationally known painter, Kerns has mounted more than 30 one-person shows in galleries in New York City, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, including three shows in the 1990s at New York’s Howard Scott Gallery.
“The visual thrust of Kerns’ recent works is the suggestion of order and life persisting despite the apparently omnivorous entropic abyss,” notes Gay, an artist and poet. “Bearing witness to the notion of morphic resonance” set forth by the English biologist Rupert Sheldrake, “the new paintings are significant departures from Kerns’ previous oeuvre of the topographical, archeological, and scarified paintings from the eighties and nineties: images which had as their essence the human hand laboring against the inevitable dark.
“Morphic resonance suggests that once a thing occurs in a specific way, that thing will reoccur throughout the world,” Gay explains. As Sheldrake puts it, “A cumulative memory will build up as the pattern becomes more and more habitual.”
Kerns’ new images reflect a fascination with this idea “that nature—that apparently random dance—might actually have a kind of gathering intelligence, a deep, internal communication,” Gay says. “The paintings suggest the human yearning, analogous to the biological yearning, for chaos’s usurpation. In creating them, 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.”