paintings > White Picket Fences: Discourses on American Dreams

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)