To open our Fall ‘25 exhibition program, Climate Control presents calipers, a solo exhibition by Ishan Clemenco. Clemenco has created a limited-edition 10-inch clear vinyl album, tautophonies, to accompany the exhibition. A performance and record launch will be held at the gallery in early October.
Calipers, in clusters of lightweight, carbon-steel measurement instruments, flutter down from an I-beam: jittering, vibrating, whirring, droning, humming, filling the angular cavern of the gallery: compound sound in motion. Ishan remarks that they look like birds, flapping and diving across his divine blue wall. An expanse of blue, the color of the sky, the color of time. A de-classified photograph of the remains of a department store, destroyed in the bombing of Hiroshima, picturing a small Shinto shrine, still standing after the blast. Spiritual indigeneity– sole survivor in the rubble. A single-channel video loop, on an iPhone 6, rests inside an old wooden box, on a black granite ledge; itself a shrine. Tibetan zimpo incense trails from two small holes drilled into a vintage toy metal globe, geographically marked at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Centrally situated, in white cube gallery space, an impaired baby grand piano, undone, stands on its side, yellow 35mm film leader bowed through its strings, humming its own undoing. A spare, transverse warp of colored chalk-lines extends horizontally to an inverted wooden construction,weighted by the adapted chalk-line vessels, re-purposed from use by unknown carpenters and engineers.
Vertical chalk-lines, struck upon the wide aspect ratio of a light blue (светло-голубой) paint field, punctuate n.T. [ blue sky: chalk-line wall drawing: 2 lines; titanium white] 2025, for Blinky Palermo (1943-1977): streaking like jet-plane vapour trails that freeze, remember, delay…
The past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history, writes Walter Benjamin in Theses on the Philosophy of History. That past is always present, contested, and learned from, in both the now and in the future, echoes and shimmers, through sight and sound, in space.
Ishan began installation on the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, August 6th, 2025.
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Ishan Clemenco (b.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 extensively 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 material, notably metal, sound, photography, and video, and has worked internationally, in Germany, Austria,and Switzerland. The site-specific installation n.T. [chalk-line network:red/ye#ow/green/white] 2019, at Furka Pass, in the Swiss Alps, is archived at Institut Furkablick. Recent exhibitions include Étendeux, at Tam Shack, with 1599fdT, 2021, Cardinal Index, at House of Seiko, curated by Cole Solinger, 2023, and COIL: TORSION LOOPS, at La Mofeta, 2023.
His work seeks to tune an environment, balancing the thorough sounding of a specific place, through research, measurement, and intuition.