The Conversation: Dawn Clements
Vernissage / Sunday February 6, 2011 /4 to 8 pm
Piazza dei Caprettari, 70 – int. 22

James Barron Art is pleased to announce Dawn Clements as the first recipient of The Conversation, an artist residency in Rome that will culminate in a salon exhibition of the work created during her Rome tenure.
 
Dawn Clements works in various media on paper.  The works range in size from a sheet of typing paper to drawings that span sixty-five feet. A work may begin on a single sheet of paper and expand across two entire walls. Clements often draws on a small table which necessitates folding the artwork, over and again, until the many folds become an embodiment of the temporal process. 
 
Clements is concerned with the retinal image before the mind interprets it, but also its evolution through time, space and light. Random dialogues (from radio or TV or bits of conversation) find themselves in her drawings, like surrealist footnotes. Before arriving at its final conceptual stage, her work tilts toward folk art, decorative art, illustration or advertising. 
 
Sometimes, Clements stitches together a set from a movie (such as from The Titanic, 1953), freeze-framing while she draws, exposing a set that is never fully visible in any one shot of the movie. Her work draws from film melodrama, TV soap operas, domestic interiors and panoramas that move between interiors and exteriors in a seamless flow.  
 
Dawn Clements’s work was included in the Whitney Biennial, 2010; "Edward Hopper and Contemporary Art,” Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2008; and is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, the Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey and many important private collections such as the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection.  Clements received her BA from Brown University and an MFA from the State University of New York, Albany. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
 
The Conversation opens a dialogue between Rome’s past and its present relationship to art, and focuses on the creation of contemporary art.  Visual artists are invited for one- to two-month residencies that culminate in a salon-style exhibition of work created during their Rome tenure.  Interviews with the artist are part of The Conversation and will be posted on our website, along with images of the artist’s work. The Conversation aims to contribute to Rome’s contemporary art production and add to the city’s artistic dialogue. 
 
For further information, contact: info@jamesbarronart.com.