Bio:
Born and raised in Pennsylvania, Brett Kern began his higher education at California University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 2003 as a Graphic Design Major. However, one year into college, after discovering a love for clay, Brett decided to switch his focus to ceramics. In the spring of 2007, he graduated from CALU with a Bachelors of Fine Arts and a focus in Ceramics. Brett immediately transitioned to West Virginia University to begin his graduate studies. West Virginia would have to wait a semester though. In the fall of 2007 Brett studied overseas as part of the WVU/Jingdezhen Ceramics Institute exchange program in Jingdezhen, PRC. In 2010 Brett received his Masters of Fine Arts from WVU.
With school out of the way, it was time for Brett to head west to begin his career as a professional artist. What better place to start that career than the ceramics mecca that is Montana? Upon graduating from WVU, Brett was awarded a long term Artist-In-Residence position at the Red Lodge Clay Center in Red Lodge, MT. The appointment lasted from August 2010 until August 2011.
However, Brett was unable to resist the siren’s song of West Virginia and returned in 2011 to begin his teaching career at Davis & Elkins College in Elkins, WV. In addition to teaching at D&E, Brett also teaches classes at the Randolph County Community Arts Center in Elkins and at the Augusta Heritage Center of D&E.
While maintaining his teaching career, Brett continues to show nationally and regionally. Taylor Books in Charleston, WV, The White Room in Thomas, WV and the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek, CA all display his art. Brett received Best in Show in the HxWxD juried sculpture show at the Rosewood Arts Center in Kettering, OH and has work in the 5th annual Beyond the Brickyard show at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, MT.
Quotes, Notes & Etc.
“Something has survived,” reads the tagline for the 1997 movie, Jurassic Park: The Lost World. Undeniably, something has survived: the infatuation I have with the pop culture of my formative years, during the late eighties and the nineties. As I age, it continues to be through these “cultural glasses” that I continue to view and interpret the world, which influences the subject matter and purpose of my work. My predilection for producing collectible objects comes from my training as a potter and my persistent preoccupation with collecting toys, pop memorabilia, and nostalgic items from my youth.
Clay and glaze are essential materials for representing my often disposable and transient subject matter as what it has, to me, truly been: enduring and precious. The mold-making and sculpting process allows me to cast, out of clay, authentic replicas of meaningful objects. Glaze and paint help to emphasize the magnificence of the material as it flows in and out of lines and wrinkles, filling the object’s surface with a wealth of depth and variation within a simplified color scheme. Gold Luster is employed sparingly to highlight specific areas of intimate interactions we have with the objects.
I find that the mold-making process imitates, in a certain way, the fossilization process. Objects are covered in a material that captures their shape and texture and this, in turn, preserves the object as a rock-like representation. Movies, television, toys and games dominated the cultural landscape of my youth. I am a product of this specific time period, and I like to think of my artwork as the fossils that will help preserve it.
My most recent body of work, The Hellenistic Series, recontextualizes ancient Greek Sculptures as pop-culture icons from the 1980’s. While making comparisons between ancient and contemporary cultures, the pieces also highlight the simultaneous difficulty and joy of growing up while trying to hold on to one’s childhood.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).