SEATTLE, WA.- The Frye Art Museum is presenting Dawn Cerny: Portmeirion. In this solo exhibition, the Seattle artist (born 1979, Carpinteria, California) creates the illusion of a domestic space through her abstract yet functional sculptures, all made at a human scale from readily available components—what Cerny has called “preschool handicraft materials.” Visitors are invited to interact with her large-scale furniture pieces, newly created for the exhibition, which offer places to sit, rest, and reorient the body. The artworks’ bright, monochromatic paint surfaces elevate the perceived value of modest materials like plywood and cardboard, highlighting the role of artifice and theatricality in art and everyday life.

“Dawn Cerny revels in the theater of the home, exploring how we perform—intentionally or not—in our daily lives,” says curator Georgia Erger. The exhibition borrows its title from a faux Mediterranean village in North Wales, built in a mishmash of architectural styles. A tourist destination rather than a township, Portmeirion is an artificial, decorative structure with no specific purpose. The village has, however, served as a set for countless film and television productions, including the cult classic British series The Prisoner (1967). Portmeirion whimsically connects to the dual role of aesthetic pleasure and practical function at play in Cerny’s art. By softening the hard edges of the museum, the artist crafts a similar space, located at the intersection between art and routine existence.

Adorning the exhibition with rugs and translucent curtains, Cerny constructs a sense of domestic intimacy within the museum’s institutional architecture. Portmeirion opens a window into the adjacent Frye Salon exhibition. There, Cerny’s sculptures reside alongside paintings the museum’s founders, Charles and Emma Frye, lived with in their Seattle home. As Erger elaborates, “spilling into the Frye Salon, Cerny’s works facilitate the delightful prospect of intimately engaging or altogether ignoring the surrounding paintings—mirroring how we live with art in our own homes.”

Dawn Cerny: Portmeirion is organized by Georgia Erger, Curator.

Frye Salon + Dawn Cerny
January 25–June 22, 2025

Frye Salon features over one hundred paintings from the Frye’s collection hung floor to ceiling—a presentation referred to as salon style. The installation approximates the dramatic viewing experience enjoyed by visitors to Charles and Emma Frye’s Seattle home in the first decades of the twentieth century. The couple displayed the collection in private living quarters and in a purpose-built gallery attached to their house in First Hill.

Seattle artist Dawn Cerny stages her artworks in conversation with the Frye Salon to consider how we live with art. In the center of the gallery, the artist reimagines the nineteenth-century “gossip chair,” conjoined seats that facilitate intimate conversation. A window cut into the wall separating the two galleries further undermines the authority of the institutional architecture, offering unexpected sightlines that reshape our view of the museum space.

This intervention furthers the Frye’s ongoing repositioning of its Founding Collection, where invited contemporary artists experiment within the traditional collection display to reveal new perspectives and critical contexts.

Frye Salon + Dawn Cerny is organized by the Frye Art Museum.