Speaking of Viewing: The Cinematic Drawing of Dawn Clements

Dawn Clements, Drawing, an exhibition at Pierogi, Brooklyn, New York, February 7-March 10, 2003.

Entering Dawn Clements's first solo exhibition in New York at Pierogi, the viewer is confronted by the sheer physicality of her work, rather unexpected in a show called Drawing. Spanning two walls at the rear of the gallery is a new work, Kitchen and Bathroom (2003), a 338-inch panoramic drawing on paper of the artist's railroad apartment, rendered in a continuous cinematic sweep from kitchen table to front door mirror. On an adjacent wall to the right is another recent expansive pan, the artist's bedroom as viewed from her bed. At first glance, they could be home-spun backdrops for the stage sets of a mid-century kitchen sink drama.

Yet scenic art anticipates performance and, in Clements's drawings, the open call of their real-time illusion of space, their "step-in and make yourself at home" allure, is overridden—overwritten—by a subtle play and seal of time that wraps the work back in on itself. As her hand fluidly reconciles three-dimensional space in two with the cool authority of a cinematic eye, the viewer, tempted by the works' almost true-to-life scale, is kept tauntingly at bay, behind the camera, out of the frame, pressing against the lens of the artist's hand panning—penning—the autobiographical topologies of her personal stage.

Rendered as a single "shot" with multiple points of view, her imaging is flawed. The chair beside the window in the corner of Kitchen and Bathroom couldn't stand in real space, let alone bear the artist's (or viewer's) weight. The wood grain of the sink cabinet has the vivid presence of a close-up. Foreground and background ply the tension of the still versus the pan, as if the artist's eye can't bear the inanimate neutrality of mechanical recording, lingering instead on the capillary run of wood grain, teaming shelves with books each identified by titled spine, glinting glasses—there's almost too much detail. A single gaze can't hold the look, and there are moments—in the accordioning of the chair, the repeat of the bathroom door, pictured first from the kitchen—where you feel Clements's eye yield/pause/blink/breath and then move on, replaying the door again, this time from the bathroom p. o. v.

The expansive horizontality of both works extends the proscenium hold of the imaged interiors across the page with the fluidity of film. However, the page itself is anything but seamless, proceeding "frame by frame," as it were, by sheets collaged by Clements as the drawing hungrily consumes the page. In her working method, the artist unfurls the drawing sequence by sequence, and the physicality of the work, asserted by the doubled seams of added paper, is further underscored by creases and folds and the irregular sizing of paper in service to the image rather than the conventional composition of a drawing contained within the page. As a medium valued for its immediacy of touch, a visual counterpart to speech in the direct expression of an artist's thought, the mark-making of Clements's process includes the physical manipulation of the support itself and the traces not only of the hand but her body as well, clambering across the page to register the kitchen ceiling molding and back again to shadow-fill the crannies skirting the base of the bathroom sink.

Careful looking and the impossible physicality of Kitchen and Bathroom and View from Bed parse the overarching momentum of these epic intimate landscape portraits into discrete views, with the formidable eye of the recording hand relaying, in fact, multiple intervals of seeing,detailing the recursive and polyphonic experience of organic being. How not to subtitle these works under one's breath "A[nother] Room of One's...