scott avery: 2013

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Dawn Clements

"Draw everyday, draw everywhere" said Dawn Clements when asked, What advice to give students?

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.

http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/artpages/dawn_clements_movie2.htm

Dawn Clements and Marc Leuthold - Table of Work: a Collaboration (Dawn Clements and Marc Leuthold) - 2011, Mixed media (including sumi ink on paper, porcelain, stoneware, wood), 303 x 126 x 30 inches (with table & sculptures) - Courtesy of Pierogi Gallery

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-couillaud/dawn-clements_b_1207546.html

Travels with Myra Hudson 2004, Sumi ink on paper, 3 x 1.4 m

detail

Monday, May 6, 2013

Sarah Sze

I have just finished reading Sarah Sze Infinite Line. A book about her exhibition at Asia Society Museum, New York back in 2011.

Sarah is an artist well known for her amazing installation works made out of a huge range of eclectic materials and objects.

The Art of Losing 2004
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan

Detail of Untitled (Tokyo) 2008

360 (Portable Planetarium) 2012

I was most interested in her drawings and paper works some of which I have posted below.

Untitled 2011 Paper & mixed media

Sarah describes her work
"I've been thinking about drawings that shift between perspectives and many ways of seeing - all in one experience"
p. 21

Checks and Balances 2011
Stone, string and ink on paper
190 x 46cm

Guggenheim as a Ruin 2009
Ink, string and collage on paper
127 x 81 cm

http://www.sarahsze.com
http://youtu.be/xk1597J5g50
http://youtu.be/fnndiUK01kU

Sarah will represent USA at the 2013 Venice Biennial

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Sopheap Pich

Some years ago I was travelling in Cambodia and caught a river ferry from Battambang to Siem Reap. As I journeyed past floating villages and numerous communities on the river banks I saw some amazing sights, to say nothing of the people themselves, so hard working, happy and friendly. Their homes were all designed to cope with massive changes in water levels as seasonal flows back filled from the Tonle Sap lake and river systems.

Fishing is a form of livelihood and so with elaborately crafted nets families would cleverly seek out food sources. (Amongst which is small fish to make the ubiquitous Cambodian version of fish sauce)

Fish nets could be on a grand scale, like monumental sculpture.

So when I saw the work of Sopheap Pich and read that he came from Battambang it was an instant connection as to his likely influences.

Upstream 2005 Bamboo, rattan & wire

Morning Glory 2011

Cycle 2 2008 Rattan & wire

http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2013/sopheap-pich
http://sopheappich.com

Monday, April 22, 2013

John Wilson Ewbank

I recently discovered that I am related to John, he was born in 1799, worked in Scotland, was instrumental in establishing the Royal Scottish Academy and was doing well by all accounts until he took to the drink and fell into poverty .... oh well! He died aged 48, in 1847.