Today’s addition again comes from the Paper exhibition at Saatchi, although it is now ended.
Today we look at a Dawn Clements work “Movie”. Dawm Celement creates large scale drawings of scenes, this one a movie. This work makes me think about our fascination with others, with living vicariously through films, and TV, through magazines and watching others. I love eavesdropping, knowing what others are doing, I think it is part of human nature, to not feel alone, or different.
This work makes me think about what we take, or rather what we understand, as we never get the whole picture, it is only our interpretation. Between the drawings of scenes and the little bits of text, there is no clear picture or narrative, but the idea of what is being observed by the artist and passed to the viewer. Like Descartes “I think therefore I am” I understand this as: I know from what I have experienced before and can make things relate to each other to gain an understanding I can except. Someone might know this “movie” and understand every detail, whilst others will not.
The three reasons for selecting this work are skills, inspiration and because. Firstly I admire the skills in both the drawing, and the concept of creating a narrative from narrative. For me this is about art, as an artists I am reshowing something, whether a story, or an emotion. Secondly, I love work that when you are somewhere else, it pops into your head and inspires you to create something, and this is the work that inspired me to create my commute blogart earlier in the week. It is the idea of capturing little moments, remembering, retelling a story. And lastly, because, I just like it, and sometimes that is enough of a reason.
What do you think?
What Saatchi says: (Text by Ben Street)
“Dawn Clements’ works use drawing as a way to document and describe durational experiences: watching a film, for instance. Employing a painstaking precision of description and often writing notes directly onto the paper, Clements uses the act of drawing as a parallel to remembering: these are aides-memoires, attempts to hold transient things in the mind. Like the tracking shots of cinema, they sweep through interiors, gathering visual information, but by eliding the human presence, abstract place and setting from their narrative contexts.”
What others have said:
From The Whitney museum Of American Art
Dawn Clements’s large-scale drawings depict interior domestic spaces, either her own surroundings or those in classic 1940s and 1950s Hollywood melodramas. She is especially interested in the idea of the home as a place of both comfort and confinement: “They are places, no matter how beautiful and wonderful they may appear, that are incarcerating of all these characters. The doors may be unlocked, but somehow the women can’t walk out the door.”
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Sophie Douglas and The Arts School 