Bio:
Dawn Kramlich, a Texas-born artist and writer, was transplanted to Pennsylvania halfway through her adolescence. She earned her BA degree from Muhlenberg College, with a double major in English and Art, producing the first cross-major creative honors thesis (paintings + poems) in the history of Muhlenberg’s English and Art departments. While at Muhlenberg, Kramlich became a member of the Phi Beta Kappa National Honors Society and graduated magna cum laude with honors. After Muhlenberg, she moved to Philadelphia (where she still lives and works), and received her MFA in Studio Art from Moore College of Art & Design. Kramlich has shown her work widely in the US, and internationally in Ireland. Most notably, she exhibited alongside Jaume Plensa, Jenny Holzer, and Glenn Ligon in "Dialogic" at Rowan University's gallery, and in the 4-person installation-based exhibit entitled "PaperScapes" at the Philadelphia Art Alliance in 2017. Her artwork has been published in "CODAmagazine" and "THE magazine," and she was recently a finalist for the Meyer Family Award for Contemporary Art at the Main Line Art Center.
Artist Statement
My impetus for working is the notion that the communicative digital technology of our current Information Age – Internet, cell phones, social media – changes our brains’ methods of processing information, consequently changing both our means of communicating and the ways we use verbal language within our cultural milieu.
Computer-mediated communication is simultaneously both the theater and death of language; language experiences globalization because of the Internet, but there is always something lost in translation. Valuing quantity and instant gratification over quality and details causes this slippage of language, resulting in fragmented vagueness that caters to miscommunication and cleaved multiplicities of the Self. The interstices of meaning are lost or ignored. Language is a shape-shifter, and I deconstruct moments of mis/communication by catering to the subjective with a selection of text which has been carefully altered and/or repeated to create ambiguity.
Verbal language’s shape-shifting largely occurs when one’s subjective layers its emotional or contextual social perception upon the words. When words are presented - as in my work - within a visual context that lacks an overarching verbal narrative context or author, each subjective has a choice of role: speaker, receiver, or observer. The (usually subconscious) selection of a role, along with the viewer’s subjective version of the text’s meaning, reveals something about themself to themself - if they are willing to internally go there. I long to initiate dialogue and create an experience through which viewers contemplate their relationship to (and with) language — because few things are as powerful and political as language.
Computer-mediated communication is simultaneously both the theater and death of language; language experiences globalization because of the Internet, but there is always something lost in translation. Valuing quantity and instant gratification over quality and details causes this slippage of language, resulting in fragmented vagueness that caters to miscommunication and cleaved multiplicities of the Self. The interstices of meaning are lost or ignored. Language is a shape-shifter, and I deconstruct moments of mis/communication by catering to the subjective with a selection of text which has been carefully altered and/or repeated to create ambiguity.
Verbal language’s shape-shifting largely occurs when one’s subjective layers its emotional or contextual social perception upon the words. When words are presented - as in my work - within a visual context that lacks an overarching verbal narrative context or author, each subjective has a choice of role: speaker, receiver, or observer. The (usually subconscious) selection of a role, along with the viewer’s subjective version of the text’s meaning, reveals something about themself to themself - if they are willing to internally go there. I long to initiate dialogue and create an experience through which viewers contemplate their relationship to (and with) language — because few things are as powerful and political as language.
All images and statements copyright © Dawn Kramlich 2018
