Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sculpture, drawing, photography
Website: ishanclemenco.com
Ishan Clemenco was born in San Francisco in 1955. He began his career as a composer, working in the tradition of just intonation and extended-duration minimalism associated with the 1960s. Private composition residencies with composer Lou Harrison and studies in poetics with Anne Waldman at the Naropa Institute led to extensive travel in Asia, including two years on the Indian subcontinent and a survey of European megalithic sites. A visit to Constantin Brancusi's Paris atelier proved decisive: Clemenco resolved to translate his preoccupations with intonation and duration in music into treatments of surface and volume in sculpture. He has exhibited and performed internationally, including in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and contributed a work curated by Luis Camnitzer to the National Library of Spain in Madrid.
Since 2000, Clemenco has developed a vocabulary centered on site-specific chalk-line wall drawing and large-scale suspended chalk-line installations, using adapted marking instruments and hand-ground pigments in a limited palette of oranges, blues, and whites. His vertical chalk-line drawings establish what he calls "optical drones." He also works in metal, sound, photography, and video. His practice is in deep dialogue with the history of minimalism, Fluxus, and conceptual art, dedicating individual works to figures such as Blinky Palermo, Terry Fox, and Yoko Ono.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.