Elise d'Awson

Bio

Elise Dawson is an artist curator from Winnipeg, Manitoba. She graduated from the School of Art at the University of Manitoba in 2012 where she studied critical theory and drawing. Dawson was a founding curator of Chesterfield, a freely distributed magazine that accepts submissions from emerging artists. An impassioned community member, Dawson is on the Board of Director's at Mentoring Artists for Women's Art. In 2013 she completed her mentorship with Val Klassen.

 

Artist Statement

Elise Dawson collects ideas. To her, the Concept is paramount. Methods and materials are considered secondary. The execution is obfuscated by the process. Like Duchamp, Dawson is interested in the subversion of art world assumptions. Her work questions the death, commodification, and the preservation of the art object. It examines the futility in preserving something that is already gone.

We are bombarded with a cultural barrage of imagery through television, computers, and the screens of our personal devices. Dawson appropriates these mediums in a conceptual strategy to unpack and trace the confusion this assault creates. She is fascinated by all things digital, and she is excited by the possibility of an art object being completely dematerialized. Although the layered and flat representations in her drawings appear to connect to the physical world, they seek only to reference rather than embody the material world. The idea, to Dawson, is always more real than its realization.