Sean Slemon
Slemon is a South African artist who primarily works in sculpture, installation and printmaking. He lives and works in New York City, New York. Slemon graduated from Michaelis School of Art, UCT with distinction in 2001 and will finish with an MFA at Pratt Institute, New York City, New York in 2007.
Slemon’s interest in public space and architecture has evolved during his work with the production and installation of museum and heritage sites in South Africa and abroad. Since 2001, Slemon has worked on ‘The New Northern Cape Legislature Buildings’ in Kimberley, Constitutional Hill Museum, Johannesburg. ‘46664 A Prisoner Working in the Garden’, Nelson Mandela Foundation traveling exhibition and more recently on Kliptown “The People Shall Govern” Museum.
For a time Slemon worked with Lord Cultural Resources in the expansion of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa.
His art
Through his plywood installation, Slemon questions the identity of Hurricane Katrina and the social disparities she revealed. His choice of plywood, a pedestrian material, references its use in constructing buildings all over the USA. Slemon cuts the plywood sheets into islands that come together in a loose assemblance of abstracted aerial views of the Katrina’s currents from satellite images. These forms gravitate around the eye of the storm. Layers of plywood, varying in width and length reflect the depth and height of Katrina's precipitation. Slemon carves these forms suggesting pauses and thrusts of Katrina's unbridled motion charging through space.
Slemon's work was part of "Contour: The Definitive Line" curated by Jon Coffelt that included the work of Sara Garden Armstrong, Steve Baris, Luis Carle, Travis Childers, Clayton Colvin, Jacob Hill Grad, Louis Hill, Lee Isaacs, Antjuan Oden, Amy Pleasant, Eric Rhein, Jessica Rosner, Virginia Scruggs, Joel Seah, Yuko Shimizu, and J. M. Walker.
Quotes
Slemon has been preoccupied with space for some time now. In 2005 he reproduced the internal footprint of the Premises Gallery at the Civic Theatre in Braamfontein using gradually reducing layers of carpet that rose up to form a two-and-a-half-ton mountain. In this work entitled Uplift:The Mountain Premises he sought to render the gallery space as solid material. By entirely occupying a space with an artwork, an act that must have caused a certain degree of inaccessibility and inconvenience, Slemon sought to probe the manner in which we attempt to control the personal and public spaces that we occupy. -Jackie McInnes, SA Art Times, Issue 8, August 2006
Slemon develops ideas from known sources and executes his works from facts and statistical data about his subjects. He gains insight through these pre-existing information sources that posits imaginary boundaries and artificial aesthetic concerns assimilating ways to invoke viewer response. -Jon Coffelt
Slemon is a joint winner of South Africa’s 2005 Sasol New Signatures Competition, and was presented with the Judges Award. He was awarded a commission for the first Spier Biennial in 2001 and served on the committee for Visual Arts Network of South Africa. He is currently working on a major commission for Pratt Institute in New York City.