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NYFA Artists
Artists' Fellowship - 2005
Printmaking/Drawing/Artists Books

Artist Statement:
I'm interested in melodramatic figures, language and spaces. In melodramatic movies and soap operas characters are often confined and sometimes seem to be imprisoned within their domestic, social and public spaces and they are bound to people they love and hate. The spatial confinement and interactions between characters provide feelings of both safety and anxiety resulting in ever-looming crisis and excessive drama in gesture and language. I draw these characters, the things they say and their interior spaces. I also look at my own world that is usually inside and is both comforting and claustrophobic. In these autobiographical drawings, I draw from life. Most of the time I make the drawings in confined spaces such as a small apartment and so, in order to make large works I glue paper together and fold the drawings to a workable size. I draw my bed from bed, my kitchen table at the kitchen table. As a result, the drawings get torn and repaired and generally distressed through the wear and tear of the process. Sometimes there is a contrast between my style of drawing and the battered state of the drawings' surfaces. In this work, as in my work from tv and movies, I incorporate many points of view to create whole but fractured narratives and spaces. -Dawn Clements, Brooklyn 2005

More about the Artist:
Dawn Clements lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her work was featured in Susan Rethorst: RETRO-(intro)SPECTIVE (Danspace, NY, NY, 2011), and included in Making Room (MassMoCA, North Adams, MA, 2012); 11th National Drawing Invitational: New York: Singular Drawings (Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock Arkansas, 2012); Inside Outside/Outside In (Lesley Heller Workspace, 2012); Paper Variables (Dieu Donne Papermill, NY, NY 2011), Stranger Than Fiction (Santa Barbara Museum, Santa Barbara, CA 2010), 2010 Whitney Biennial (Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, 2010); Edward Hopper and Contemporary Art (Kunsthalle Vienna, 2008), Open House: Working in Brooklyn (Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, 2004); Aperto at the Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy, 1993). Recent solo shows include exhibitions at Pierogi (Brooklyn, 2012), Sint-Trudoabdij (Male, Belgium, 2011), Hales Gallery (London, England, 2010); Acme Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA, 2010); The Boiler, Pierogi (Brooklyn, NY, 2010); Taft School (Watertown, CT, 2009); Pierogi Leipzig (Leipzig, Germany, 2008); Pierogi (Brooklyn, NY 2007). A 3-person exhibition at Fondation Salomon (Alex, France, 2013) is forthcoming. In 2012 she received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship; in 2005 a fellowship in the category of Printmaking/Drawing/Artists’ Books from the New York Foundation for the Arts; in 1993 grants from the Bohen Foundation and Arts Matters (Rockefeller Foundation); in 2011 was an artist in-residence at Sint-Trudoabdij in Male, Belgium, in 2009 at Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, in 2000 at Middlebury College, in 2004 at the Farpath Residency in Dijon, France and was a guest printmaker at Princeton University in 2006. Ms. Clements’ work can be found in many public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art (NY); Whitney Museum of American Art (NY); Saatchi Collection (London); Western Bridge Collection (Seattle); Tang Museum (Saratoga Springs, NY); Princeton Art Museum (Princeton, NJ). Ms. Clements is represented by Pierogi Gallery, Brooklyn, New York.

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