Ishan Clemenco began his career as a composer whose early work was concerned with precise intonations and the process of extended duration associated with 60s Minimalism. Private residencies with the composer Lou Harrison (1917-2003) and poetics studies with Anne Waldman at Naropa Institute led to extended Asian travels. After two years on the Indian subcontinent and a survey of European megalithic sites, Clemenco visited the Parisian atelier of Brancusi, where he resolved to translate the concerns of intonation and duration into treatments of surface and volume in constructed sculpture. Completing long internships in stone and metal fabrication Clemenco refined the conception of his work receiving a Marin Arts Council Individual Artist Grant for Sculpture in 1996. The grant enabled him to visit the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, where he saw the essential reduction in the work of Donald Judd as central to the passage from Russian Constructivism to an architecture in space that was non-functional while retaining integrity of color, material, form and placement in relationship to site. In 1998 and 2001 Clemenco was included in two 3-person exhibitions of sculpture at the SFMOMA Artist Gallery in San Francisco, directed by Marian Parmenter.

In 2001 he shifted his art practice from an emphasis on the use of hard, industrial materials to the realization of intensive, ephemeral, site-specific installations utilizing chalkline marking instruments and hand-ground pigments. In 2002 Clemenco had his first solo exhibition of wall drawing with Takada Gallery in San Francisco. He is represented by sm.ART, a Munich-based curatorial consultancy, directed by Sibylle Mueller, and is included in steirischerbst:03 at Graz, Austria, in October 2003. In November 2003 Clemenco will have a solo exhibition of works on paper and wall drawing with sm.ART in Munich, Germany.