Cee Lavery

Artist Statement

On a cold March evening in Montreal, Cesario Lavery was walking home from a shift in an unfamiliar part of town when he stumbled across an old, discarded book of early literary criticism on the great Franz Kafka. Cracking it open, Cesario was amazed to discover not only an extraordinary book, but a portal to the life of an extraordinary man - the book's previous owner, Dr Chaim Fischel Shatan, the (relatively unknown) founder of the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder diagnosis. DER EYDES (Yiddish: The Witness) is Cesario’s ongoing serialized comic about the treasure he found and the treasures it led to.

Two-page sequence from DER EYDES VOLUME III, 2022.

Bio

Cesario (Cee) Lavery is a research-driven writer and comics maker working in graphic non-fiction. His current project is DER EYDES, an ongoing serialized graphic work about an old Kafka book, a state-suppressed psychiatrist, and a family mystery. Cesario’s work has been supported by a Canada Council for the Arts Research & Creation Grant, a Microgrant for Cultural and Creative Exploration from the Museum of Jewish Montreal, and a MacDowell Fellowship. He lives and works on the island of Tiohtià:ke, or Montréal.

ceelavery.com