Bio:
Dawn Kramlich, a Texas-born artist and writer, was transplanted to Pennsylvania halfway through her adolescence. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Muhlenberg College with a double major in English and Art. For the English major, Dawn produced a creative honors thesis consisting of immense research on ekphrasis alongside the creation of an original series of poems. Each of these poems was conceptually paired with a painting from her senior thesis series for her Art major. It was the first cross-major creative thesis in the history of Muhlenberg’s English and Art departments. While at Muhlenberg, Dawn became a member of the Phi Beta Kappa National Honors Society and graduated magna cum laude with honors in each of her two majors. Upon completing her undergraduate studies, she moved to Philadelphia (where she still lives and works), and received her MFA from Moore College of Art & Design. In the past 5 years, she has shown her work widely along the US east coast, in California, and internationally in Ireland. Her art has been published in CODAmagazine and THE Magazine, and her writing has been published in Muses (a literary magazine) as well as InLiquid’s blog (a Philadelphia-based non-profit arts organization).
Artist Statement
"My impetus for working is the notion that communicative digital technology – Internet, cell phones, social media – changes our brains’ methods of processing information, consequently changing both our means of communicating and the ways we use 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.
I find that our minds, information resources, and language itself, are turning into palimpsests – numerous strata of fragmented language, whether visual or verbal, never fully procurable due to dense histories of rapidly scanned information and cultural appropriation. As a ‘wordsmith’, I employ repetition, layering and text-specificity in sculptures and installations to examine the moments when language fails to accomplish one of its base claims, clarification. 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; each consecutive participant’s perception molds it anew, and I deconstruct moments of communication or miscommunication by simultaneously drawing attention to such interstices and using them as a metaphor for each subjective’s multiple modes of existence."
- Dawn Kramlich, 2017
I find that our minds, information resources, and language itself, are turning into palimpsests – numerous strata of fragmented language, whether visual or verbal, never fully procurable due to dense histories of rapidly scanned information and cultural appropriation. As a ‘wordsmith’, I employ repetition, layering and text-specificity in sculptures and installations to examine the moments when language fails to accomplish one of its base claims, clarification. 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; each consecutive participant’s perception molds it anew, and I deconstruct moments of communication or miscommunication by simultaneously drawing attention to such interstices and using them as a metaphor for each subjective’s multiple modes of existence."
- Dawn Kramlich, 2017
All images and statements copyright © Dawn Kramlich 2017
