Dawn Clements

Clements' drawing Mrs. Jessica Drummond's (My Reputation, 1945) (2010) was featured in the 2010 Whitney Biennial.

It's a drawing of the bedroom of the main character in the film My Reputation in ballpoint pen.

Unlike most of her interiors, this drawing depicts the actress Barbara Stanwyck playing Jessica Drummond.

The drawing is a combination of several scenes and shows different moments and camera angles in the room.

Clements taught classes in fine arts at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Brooklyn College, and Princeton University.

Dawn Clements (1958–2018) was an American contemporary artist and educator.

She was known for her large scale, panoramic drawings of interiors that were created with many different materials in a collage-style.

Her primary mediums were sumi ink and ballpoint pen on small to large scale paper panels.

In order to complete a drawing she cut and pasted paper, editing and expanding the composition to achieve the desired scale.

Her completed drawings reveal her working process through the wrinkles and folds evident in the paper.

She described her work as "a kind of visual diary of what [she] see[s], touch[es], and desire[s]. As I move between the mundane empirical spaces of my apartment and studio, and the glamorous fictions of movies, apparently seamless environments are disturbed through ever-shifting points of view."

Clements was born in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1958.

She was raised in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, where she graduated from Chelmsford High School.

She received her M.F.A. from the State University of New York at Albany in 1989 and her B.A. from Brown University in 1986.

Clements made large-scale drawings that explored interior spaces.

Her drawings were inspired by her own domestic environment and also by rooms viewed in soap operas and melodramatic films.

She was especially interested in the spaces that women occupy.

In her drawings, Clements often compiled a selection of film interiors observed from different angles.

The final arrangement of these interiors played with perception and perspective.

The drawing flowed over multiple pieces of paper to create a distorted panorama that reflected time, memory, space, and home.

“With the panoramic drawings,” she said, “I’m interested in the way we see as we move through life, instead of when we’re sitting still.”

She received many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts in 2012, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship in 2013, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship in 2015.

Clements died December 4, 2018, in Bronx, New York, after a battle with breast cancer.

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