Grasping at Grief

Dawn Cerny's new show at the Henry is about death and mourning in the West. Her works are pretty good, especially the hordes of paper doll-type figures caught in the throes of death, many of them with red yarn entrails pouring out. The inclusion of medieval warriors in this collection was particularly charming. There's also a series of watercolors of death-related T-shirts with a modern goth aesthetic (in a clever marketing stratagem, you can buy one of these in a limited edition from the gift shop), which I found impressive in their technique, as Cerny convincingly related the wrinkly, floppy texture of T-shirt material using paint and paper.

The conceit of the exhibit is the comparison of mourning rituals across centuries, highlighting continuity. In the room with the T-shirt paintings are cases of Victorian artifacts and seven taxidermed owls. 19th-century photographs of people in mourning garb and vast flower memorials also decorate the walls.

The most impressive things in this exhibit were intricately woven pieces fashioned from the hair of the deceased. Two were watch chains, one of which was probably three feet long when measured end-to-end and reminded me of the lanyard braids that children make in crafts classes. This, however, was almost excruciating to look at for the fineness of its craftsmanship, knowing that it was made from a material as delicate as human hair. I can't imagine that anyone ever actually used it as a watch chain (though the implication of its role as an anchor of time is appropriate to an artifact of mourning). The other watch chain was much thicker in diameter and was a weave between human hair and gold links. Again, the painstaking labor that went into it was obvious. Finally, and this piece was the most moving for me, there was a locket that appeared to be empty. However, on a closer look, it was in fact upholstered on the inside by finely woven black hair. By invoking the "missing" photograph in the locket, this piece evoked with incredible effectiveness the emptiness inherent in mourning, and the necessarily futile effort to retain the tangible.

Grieving and mourning are a process of coming to terms with the impossible, of accepting "never again". Commonly, the most painful part of death is the survivors' consequent inability to touch the deceased. The frank admission of this, evident in these hair pieces, struck me in contrast to our modern terror of corpses and any of their byproducts. Now, carrying a watch chain or wearing an adornment made of a dead person's hair would seem "creepy" or "morbid" - like the Victorian portraits-in-death of children posed to appear as though they were alive. As stirring as these portraits can be, the works in hair as a sort of Ariadne's thread for the beyond, doomed to fail, were ultimately the most moving pieces in this show, if only for their sheer difference from our rituals of mourning today.