This particular series came about out of the necessity of using materials at hand: old fencing that I had removed from parts of the property where i lived at the time. The material itself shifted the nature of my work in a new way and direction while still allowing the various idioms that exist in previous paintings to be evident. This series deals with addressing the collective and personal myths we, as a culture, have created in regards to home/place; and therefore to land and what we in the “west” deem to be “nature” and our relationships to a wide spectrum of other societal/spiritual ideas that are directly woven into the very fabric of the lives we are currently living. The pieces individually and collectively are about the borders/boundaries we create/build, and the things we purposely choose to hide or to show; depending on what side of the fence one stands on and what perspective or vantage point that creates; both figuratively and metaphorically. The work strives to actively embody the dismantling/deconstruction of these cultural myths through and in the forms/images themselves. While also looking toward transforming/reconstructing the notion of interior and exterior spaces; be they felt, thought or experienced physically. And calls for the dissemination of our identity through the transmutation of material and idea. Shadows being brought into the light and casting yet more shadows to see into and through; that mirror that strips away illusions taught, professed, created and passed on. I have chosen to take down these white washed myths, bathe in our dirty flood waters, and sift through the tangled wreckage to create a place to once again connect with. - Aaron Czerny

Czerny elevates, through this collection, this ubiquitous symbol of American identity and drains it of its “whiteness” in order to communicate the urgency for us to reexamine the American Dream, thus re-visiting it as site, where new identity mappings can occur. Czerny’s "fences", painted in frenzied jazz states, confronts the idea of unilateral place-making in our boundaried existences with poetic interplay between title and image. White Picket Fences: Discourses on American Dreams, offers us a first hand look into the self and its relation to the land that it has fenced itself off from.
-Sherwin Bitsui
Poet/Author of Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press 2003) and Flood Song
(Copper Canyon Press 2009)