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Torch Songs
A Solo Exhibition
Curated by Mallory Breiner
McCarthy Arts Gallery
Saint Michael’s College
November 6th - December 12th, 2025
exhibition text by Mallory Breiner:
Kern’s work is anything but static. It is directional and slippery. Transfiguration, an essential
change from one form to another, is ever-present. Complex webs of emotion -- formless, fleeting
or fully overwhelming -- become physical objects arranged in relational compositions. They
recall quilts, stained-glass windows, x-rayed bodies, and cosmological charts. Physical beings,
so real and solid, slip away into incorporeal ghostly twins of themselves. Her materials are part
reliquary, where objects once touched or held become hypercharged and revered. They are also
engaged in a battle against degradation; fragile things frozen in time in pools of colorful resin.
Voids are treated as both exigent, aching absences and profoundly present portals to other
states of being. Space is planar, perhaps vertical, and steeped with longing. A ladder made of
roses reaches upward but cannot be climbed. A wheel of resin-encapsulated roses is mirrored
by flowers made of rose dust, which is mirrored by traces of etched acrylic. The sculptures invite
us to imagine that each being projects out from itself in infinite directions into increasingly
diffused forms.
Time is painstakingly counted, endured, and yet also travelled through via memory or imagining.
It warps, expands, rips in half and hyper-focuses. The past is poured over, dissected, perhaps
altered. The present and future ripple forward in response.
Sound is treated as a register beyond language. The ring of a bell or the guttural cry of grief.
The power of voices harmonizing together. The rush of water in a river. When words cannot
reach the place that is beckoning, sound attempts to do so.
Torch Songs are both beacons and laments, cathartic releases ushering one forward when darkness threatens to consume or
extinguish. Kerns’ work asks us, when the systems we’ve inherited are insufficient, whether
they are spiritual, social, or emotional, how do we build new structures of meaning? How do we
hold each other through grief with care, tenderness and curiosity? In a climate of cruelty, how do
we center love?