MORE REVIEWS OF SHOWS I'VE SEEN AND PEOPLE HAVE REVIEWED

So it has been a little while since I have talked about shows that I have seen and I thought I would atleast highlight two that have gotten reviews in the Brooklyn Rail and a few that I thought were standouts in my adventures. So here goes.

First up we have Dawn Clements solo show at Pierogi. As I have said before I have met this artist on several occasions and she is absolutely amazing. She does both large and small scale works but what I find most compeling are her large scale room sized drawings. I shit you n ot these things are enormous and it's interesting how her process first started. In an interview with Eve Aschheim of the Brooklyn Rail Dawn answers this process quetion by stating " In 2000 when I was a in residence at Middleberry College. I started with A chair. I liked the way it was drawn but didn't like it as a drawing. It seemed like just some dumb little thing. So I thought if I add onto this then maybe I'll draw the whole wall. And then thought, oh, this is interseting, I could do the whole room. After four months I had drawn the entire apartment". Dawn's work is monumental. When you stand infront of one of her pieces it's like standing in front of whatever room she happened to be drawing at that time. However perspective is skewed at times and the way her compositions melt together it's as if you are caught in a memory of what that room was. In a follow-up review of her show in the Brooklyn Rail Cassandra Neyenesch says " Dawn Clements seems to be operating in the expanding realm that Proust chartered, the project of depicting the three deminsional quality of memory". This distorted view of reality doesn't take away from the majesty of her drawings and the intersting way she incorporates folds and wrinkles of the giant sheets of paper that are connected to create her scenes.

Aleksandra Mir's recent show Newsroom 1986-2000 chronicles her perceptions and experiences right up to the tragic events of 2001 while living in NYC. She presented these accounts as large scale black and white ink drawings on paper thaty were roughly the size of a Michael Scoggins drawing. As you entered the gallery it was almost as if you had been transported into a mid-80's newspaper room with a dozen or so of her assistants dutifully filling in Mir's newspaper coverish drawings. Each assistant would have several sharpie markers in hand tediously filling in letters and images whil listening to ipods or trying not to fall asleep againts their table supported arms. It was quite a sigth to behold. Unfortunately this exhibition was taken down before I could get any images. As Jen Schwarting accounts of the show "Mir's drawings recapitulate and resist the press's numbing mechanisms with personalized, messy, comix-style lettering. But her social model is her more significant message, and the collective organizing, colaborating, photo snapping and dialogue that go into it are the strengths of her operation.