Carl Dern

Carl Dern learned to use different media at the San Francisco Art Institute and at the University of California, Berkeley. He creates single sculptures and assemblages that offer a chair or a ladder as a stand-in for the human figure. Dern will take a chair, for example, which represents a human figure at rest, and transform it into a symbol of physical energy, of a human being moving through space. He wants his pieces to challenge our notions “of what a human form should look like.”