ARTIST STATEMENT
The herstory of an “Indian girl with no name,” 4th daughter of LaPointe Chief Waubojeeg (d.1793) is my pain point and origin to native blood before America’s time, with my eyes having lived through a lens of whiteness. This erasure, this not knowing, has always bothered me as a boundary shielding the truth; yet my subconscious reaches to the past with an awareness that’s in conflict with the present. My bloodline is trussed, I face the silent disposability of memory. Each of the seven metal pins is a familial link lacing herstory and mine back to the tribe. The dual painted face shield acts as a modern narrative against an 1860 map pinning geographical origins.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Cynthia Kerby is a mixed-media visual artist, curator, jewelry designer, former college-level educator, and partner of a design studio in the Chicago area. Originally from Michigan with Métis Ojibwe/French/Canadian ancestry, her work has been shown at numerous galleries, art centers, publications, and in various poetry collections. Recently, she received Best in Show at Gallery 116 in St. Charles, Illinois. Cynthia has curated exhibitions at The Westchester Children’s Museum in New York and at Space 900 in Evanston, where she practices her art. A recipient of a Ragdale Foundation Artist Residency in Lake Forest, she earned her MFA in Visual Communication from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
In her work, she makes close observations of life’s frailties and uncertainties through a nonlinear lens of personal awareness and curiosity. Showing familiar objects in unfamiliar ways. Her artist’s voice is a way of dealing with pressures of the external and internal which often have a disquieting effect, puncturing boundaries that can haunt her own awareness of this imbalanced world. She experiments with the intertwining of the unexpected that becomes resonant and contemplative for the viewer. Her threaded representations urge the viewer to look deeper into the crisis point. She cross-stitches narratives that pose questions to stimulate cognitive reactions, with works that facilitate change in human behavior while promoting awareness towards activism.
© Cynthia Kerby