Dawn Clements at The Boiler

Posted February 14, 2010

Boiler

2 April – 7 May, 2010

Pierogi is pleased to present new work by Dawn Clements at The Boiler. Clements, whose panoramic drawing of a film interior is currently on view in the Whitney Biennial 2010, has taken on a monumental drawing at The Boiler that won’t be finished until the day of the opening. As is typical with Clements’ work, she will not know the final size of the drawing until it is completed, but it will be in the range of 14 x 25 feet and will be approximately 1:1 scale to the actual boiler in the space. Clements’ endeavor to draw what’s around her often draws her into very large-scale work; the first work I saw 10 years ago was a 78-foot long drawing done during a residency in Middlebury, VT. Her work usually develops in a serendipitous way—she responds to what she sees and doesn’t know the end point until she reaches it. She may begin working on a very modest scale but the work often ends upmany times larger as she glues pieces of paper to the edges of the working drawing where she decides to continue drawing. The wrinkles and tears that develop as a result of her process are the record of a very active, performative drawing practice. These marks and wrinkles are important elements of her work and that record will be in the Boiler drawing, as well as the dirt and dust from the cement floor as she drags it around the space to find optimal drawing points.

Both Clements’ domestic and film interiors tend to be drawn from multiple perspectives—either as she moves around to view the domestic interior, or as the point of view of the film changes—and so the resulting works reveal an odd sense of space. In them a constantly shifting perspective (as well as shifts in scale) is blended into an apparently seamless one. This work is drawn in Sumi ink with a wet-to-dry brush and will be shown opposite the boiler itself.
Clements’ work ranges from interiors and characters developed from film, television, and soap opera, to interiors from her own domestic environment. The work included in the Whitney Biennial (Mrs. Jessica Drummond’s (My Reputation, 1945)) is drawn from her interests in film and melodrama. Working with ballpoint pen ink on paper, Clements drew while viewing the film, weaving multiple edited scenes from the film into an 18-foot drawing.
Clements’ work has been included in numerous exhibitions, including “Edward Hopper and Contemporary Art” at the Kunsthalle Wein (Vienna, 2008). Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) and the Whitney Museum of Art (NYC), among others. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from the State University of New York (Albany).