Sean Slemon

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Sean Slemon is a South African artist who works in sculpture, installation and printmaking.

Slemon graduated from Michaelis School of Art in Cape Town in 2001. He currently lives and works in New York City, New York and plans on finishing his Master of Fine Arts degree at Pratt Institute, in New York City in 2007.

Slemon’s interest in public space and architecture 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, and ‘46664 A Prisoner Working in the Garden’, Nelson Mandela Foundation traveling exhibition.

[edit] His art

Slemon's work was also selected as one of 17 artists to be part of Contour: The Definitive Line curated by Jon Coffelt. The artist were asked to define the concept of contour.^[1] The exhibition also included Clayton Colvin, Lee Isaacs and Virginia Scruggs.

[edit] 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^{[citation needed]}

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.^{[citation needed]}