Ishan Clemenco

Ishan Clemenco (*1955 San Francisco) began his career as a composer whose early work was concerned with just intonation and extended duration associated with 60s minimalism.

Private composition residencies with Lou Harrison (1917-2003), and poetics studies with Anne Waldman at Naropa Institute, led to extensive Asian travels. After two years on the Indian sub-continent, and a survey of European Megalithic sites, he visited the Parisian atelier of Constantin Brancusi, where he resolved to translate the concerns of intonation and duration in music into treatments of surface and volume in constructed sculpture.

Since 2000, he has worked intensively with adapted chalk-line marking instruments, developing a vocabulary of visual and spatial possibilities for site-specific chalk-line wall drawing, and large-scale suspended chalk-line installations.

He makes work in a variety of materials, notably metal, sound, photography, and video, and has worked internationally, in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. A recent site-specific installation n.T. (chalk-line network: red/yellow/green/white) 2019, at Furka Pass, in the Swiss Alps, is in the archive of Institut Furkablick.

His work seeks to tune an environment, balancing the thorough sounding of a specific place through research, measurement, and intuition, offering an immersive experience.