Artist Statement

Transitory Belonging

Drawing as an immediate and transitive action, facilitates the visual expression of space, time and experience. Against a backdrop of increasingly sophisticated imaging technology, and an expanded use of hybrid media in the arts, the activity of drawing can assume a dynamic and shifting position between centrality and the margins. It is from this unique tension of the understood and the emerging, the learned versus the instinctual, that drawing becomes possibility within contemporary practice. While I work in a variety of media, from paper works, to installation to digital video, the extant potential of drawing informs all of my working processes. On the one hand this has afforded me a migratory ability to move freely between these differing approaches, while simultaneously allowing them to inform and change one another.

More often than not, I conscript and amend ‘found’ visual documents, such as maps, passports and film footage to inform and develop my work, and in turn mediate it’s content. Through the combined processes of alteration, isolation and dissection, the assimilation of these materials into my own visual lexicon, correspondingly embodies the dual attributes of presence and absence, antecedent and latent possibility. The work that emerges from such a strategy accordingly retains something of the materials prior history, in combination with my own, new directive.

Artist Bio / CV

Originally from Glasgow, Scotland, Dawn Gavin currently lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. Her work investigates issues of identity and displacement, employing a range of media from collage and installed drawings to digital video.

EDUCATION

MSc (Electronic Imaging) School of Media and Imaging, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Scotland U.K.
MFA (Fine Art) School of Fine Art, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Scotland U.K.
BA (Hons) First Class (Drawing and Painting) School of Fine Art, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, Scotland U.K.

SELECTED RECENT EXHIBITIONS

2008
The Trawick Contemporary Arts Prize Heinemann Myers Contemporary Art, Bethesda, MD
Sondheim FInalists Exhibition Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD
Paper[space] Philadelphia Art Alliance, Philadelphia, PA
Ethnography of No Place Rosenberg Gallery, Goucher College, Towson, MD
Committed The Fraser Gallery, Bethesda, MD

2007
Digital VD The Crane Art Center, Philadelphia, PA
You Are Here: Maps Redefined by Contemporary Mid-Atlantic Artists Ellipse Art Center, Arlington, VA
Obsessive Aesthetics Maryland Art Place, Baltimore, MD
Believe it! 14 Painters Creative Alliance, Baltimore, MD
Primed WPA/Corcoran Annual Auction, Washington D.C.

2006
Video Projections Art Basel Event, Deluxe Arts, Miami, FL
+es+ pa++erns Pinkard Gallery, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD
Annual Juried Exhibition School 33 Art Center, Baltimore, MD
Dangerous Books Area 405, Baltimore, MD
Drawing Conclusions: An Inquiry Biggin Gallery, Auburn University, AL