DRAWINGS
Clements, Dawn
U.S. (1958 - 2018 )
Middlebury
2000
Sumi ink drawing and IVA glue on paper
78 1/2 x 972 in. (199.4 x 2468.9 cm) overall, irregular
Gift of William and Ruth True
FA 2014.298

Dawn Clements takes inspiration from everyday spaces and recreates them in highly detailed and expressive sumi ink drawings. Middlebury depicts the entire perimeter of the apartment that Clements lived in as an artist-in-residence at Middlebury College. Starting with a single drawing of a chair, she worked her way around the room, drawing and gluing sheets of paper together, creating a complete panorama of her living space. This panoramic viewpoint—that recalls murals—has become her signature way of representing spaces. Each individual drawing that she makes is the product of intense observation, but also of a laborious additive process. In her work, the ordinary is reconfigured in a flattened state to become extraordinary. Critics note that Clements’s works have an affinity with the visual imagery of film noir. By exploiting the dramatic and narrative potential of architectural space, her drawings may remind viewers of such classic film noir works such Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, or, in particular, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Dawn Clements was born in Woburn, Massachusetts in 1958. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from State University of New York and her BA from Brown University. Clements has been the recipient of several artist residencies, awards, and grants, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013 and the Arts International Grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1993. Her work has been featured in several solo and group exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2010. Clements’ work is part of several public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York. -- Guidebook copy for The Ghost of Architecture, July 13 to September 29, 2013.