Dawn Clements at Pierogi and Feigen

In her most compelling works, Brooklyn-based, SUNY-Albany-trained Dawn Clements engages a warped, telescoping conception of domestic interiors and the psychic freight of inhabitants' belongings. Frequently these interiors are derived from soap operas and movie melodramas, genres in which the sense of place can assume the emotional presence of a lead character. These sumi and ballpoint-ink drawings on irregularly shaped sheets of heavy paper are elaborate, whatever their size, and marked by a balance between detailed description and graphical shorthand.

In the largest of the 11 drawings at Pierogi, the 30-foot-long Dijon (2003), a view through French doors to a courtyard yields an array of sub-drawings, most of them abstract at close range. A low ceiling and mismatched chairs frame the compact still life at the heart of the 6-by-10-foot Sunnyside (North Truro 2004); a brush-and-ink description of a humble vacation cottage cedes literal accuracy to dreamlike vividness in selected details. Code of Luxury (96 by 26 inches, 2004) is a foray into color. This gouache features a pastel clutter of lamp, mirror, aspirin bottle and alarm clock atop a chest of drawers. Below, pink high heels and stockings lead to a flurry of brushstrokes evoking a prone, disheveled figure. Here, as elsewhere, conjoined sheets suggest elaborations of the original compositional impulse. One of the challenges the artist faces is to prevent this method from becoming a tic.

Drawings based on movies and TV dramas include scribbled bits of dialogue, as the artist extends to parts of the soundtrack the same attention she gives to visual details. This can lead to an airless, overloaded sketchbook style that suits the mundane yet emotionally loaded subjects. The ballpoint-and-gouache Bad Blood (2004), under 2 feet square, is stuffed with choice lines straight out of the soaps ("You better pray that baby is mine, because if it isn't ...!") among tiny portraits of tight-lipped women with big hair and smoldering stares.

These are interesting and funny, but the larger works are more visually absorbing. Narrative and architecture are conflated in Travels with Myra Hudson (2004), the centerpiece, at 10 by 46 feet, of the five-drawing Feigen show. Bent and buckling, the eccentrically shaped sheet engaged three of the gallery's walls and extended from floor to ceiling.

Interior views are spliced along its length; the press release reveals that they are drawn from Sudden Fear, a 1952 Joan Crawford/Jack Palance film. Velvety blacks and hazy dry-brushed grays at right depict a table set for two in a railway dining car with a blurred vista in the background. A staircase joins upper and lower sections, directing the viewer's eye up to a fluid reconstruction of the cloistered, book-lined study seen in the film. On the ample margins are snatches of dialogue, as well as close-ups of significant objects such as the Dictaphone around which the plot revolves. Someone who is not what he appears to be infiltrates the secure, monied world this room represents. In this remarkable drawing, shifts in scale and point of view suggest the mutability and arbitrariness of spatial structure and the provisional nature of social boundaries.

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