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Story time with Uncle Bill

Bill Radawec delves into his personal history at raw & co gallery

Wednesday, September 15, 2005

Page 54

by Lyz Bly

Diorama Debauchery

Radawec's Study sculptures were inspired by Munchkin orgies. Cleveland'svisual arts community is

peppered with unconventional characters who devotedly attend art openings throughout the city. It

doesn't matter how far east, west or south the event is located, they are there. Artist Bill Radawec is one

such person; his affable presence gives openings a feeling that is not unlike a family reunion. He is the

uncle who always has a story to tell about his adventures in faraway places. The escapades Radawec

most likes to recount are about his days in Los Angeles, where he weathered earthquakes and a stormy

relationship, crossed paths with art and movie stars, and — perhaps most important to his art career —

immersed himself in L.A.'s art scene. The excess of L.A. seems to have permanently permeated the artist's

psyche, since years after returning to Cleveland to care for his widowed mother, L.A. is still front and

center in Radawec's mind and art. His current solo exhibition at raw & co, Bill Radawec (A Study) is a

trenchant amalgamation of his two lives as a dutiful son who now lives in Parma, making art in the

basement that was decorated by his deceased father, and as a California art scenester. The atmosphere

in the small, pristine gallery is spare and appears from a distance as an installation that was created by

a resolute minimalist. The wall that parallels the entranceway to the gallery is largely imbued with traces

of Radawec's complex life as a dutiful artist-son. On this wall there are three black paintings, which are

all the same size; two framed fragments of vintage green foliage-print cloth flank the black panels. The

five works are then hung on a wall that has a dark green-blue stripe painted above, and a wider field of

aqua blue below. The colors are a direct reference to Radawec's father, as they are but a few of the

hues he used to paint the family basement, which now serves as the artist's studio. The installation is multi-

layered and complex, referencing Radawec's history, and also his personal and artistic influences. All of

the black paintings are titled A Clean Slate, but each has a subtitle, which serves as a homage to artists

Joseph Beuys, Cy Twombly, and Gary Simmons. However, the works also reference his recent

engagement to another Cleveland-area artist and, as raw & co's director and curator Per Knutas says,

“It's no accident that the black pieces were painted with chalkboard paint, as Radawec worked as a

teacher at one time in his life.” The influence of the artist's father underlies his career as an artist, his

current relationship, and perhaps his past vocation as a teacher. The wedding of his artwork with his

home life is apparent in the wall installation which, while stark and simple, is infused with emotion. As a

whole, the painted wall, the three black panels, and the two framed pieces of fabric serve as iconic keys

into Radawec's past and present realities. The artist manages to simply and intelligently give viewers a

sense of this reality, yet there is nothing mawkish about the work. The rakish side of Los Angeles is a

central theme in Radawec's sculptural works, which are all titled A Study and installed at varying heights

on the two walls adjacent to the larger installation. The works are like tiny dioramas, which the artist built

to mimic the shapes of galleries where he planned to curate exhibitions. The miniature “galleries” serve

as voyeuristic stages for raucous parties and orgies, as well as seedy and violent encounters between

scantily clad women, naked men, armed bandits, police officers and drunken merrymakers. The

debauchery is, according to Knutas, inspired by the orgiastic and supposedly destructive fêtes that the

actors who played Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz held at the Culver Hotel in Hollywood while filming.

And, while there is a degree of over-the-top partying — including bare-breasted women being ogled by

lecherous men, and groups of miniature people drinking and dancing — the works also serve as social

commentaries. In one work, a male, African-American police officer confronts a naked white man and

boy. This scene seems to reference the recent Michael Jackson child sex-abuse scandal. The twist — in

Radawec's realm both the abuser and his victim are white, and the agent of authority is black — subtly

addresses the racial subtext underlying the Jackson trial and the discourse surrounding it. But there is

more than social commentary and decadent fantasy in Radawec's sculptural studies, as the colors of his

family/current studio are present in most of the pieces. Again, even within these fanciful and, at times,

seedy scenes the artist's personal life and iconography are revealed. The ambiguous brilliance of these

scenes is realized when you recognize that you are not unlike the tiny people in the sculptural settings. As

you recognize the basement hues on the raw & co walls and the colors within the sculptural tableaux,

you realize that you are in a large-scale version of the diminutive structures that you are voyeuristically

peering in to. The effect is at once humorous and startlingly surreal. Ultimately, the exhibition delivers

what its title implies. It gives you a glimpse into the mind and reality of the artist, which is far more

complex and intelligent than any storytelling uncle at annual the family reunion.

Scene

Review: A Study

September 14-20

Page 26

By Zack Lewis

A Study -- The tiny Raw & Co. gallery doesn't just house this quirky exhibit by Bill Radawec; it's part of it.

One wall is a replica of the basement in his childhood home in Parma, complete with ugly green curtains

and faux conceptual art. A line of green paint indicates where the ceiling would be; it's extremely low,

and to imagine it compounds already palpable feelings of claustrophobia in a gallery only slightly larger

than a walk-in closet. Along the other two walls are three-dimensional, HO-scale models of what could be

the very same basement. But what's taking place inside these little boxes is what's truly strange: One can

see groups of miniature people engaged in all sorts of vaguely perverted activities. One appears to

show a sex-ed class under way, complete with demonstration; in another, a hazmat crew hoses down a

naked woman. Some bear a faint relation to current events:The naked white man and boy chatting with

a policeman might refer to Michael Jackson, while a kidnapping scene may be an allusion to the

American girl lost in Aruba. These are only descriptions, mere possibilities. Because there are no titles,

Radawec leaves it to his viewers to imagine scenarios that fit his mysterious representations. The only sure

thing is that they're physical manifestations of a bizarre, fantastic imagination. And painting the gallery

to resemble its contents was a stroke of genius. Through October 16 at Raw & Co. Gallery, 1009

Kenilworth Ave., 216-235-5511. -- Lewis

artnet Magazine

"In the Basement" Basement Memories

Irvine Fine Art Center, 14321 Yale Avenue, Irvine, CA

March 8 - April 13, 2003

by Eve Wood

Bill Radawec's latest installation, "In the Basement," is both an exercise in generosity and deep personal

exploration in which the artist recreates the basement of his family's home in Parma, Ohio. Radawec is

king of the quirky esthetic, whose past efforts include the aptly titled "natural disaster works," a group of

paintings of the fissures in the walls of his Los Angeles apartment, post-Northridge quake. In keeping with

this eccentric sensibility, Radawec has continued his investigation into these varied "natural occurrences,"

only this time out he's added a personal touch. Radawec turned the gallery into an exact replication of

the basement in his family home. The artist, whose exacting nature is certainly evident here, measured the

patterns on the basement walls, took color samples and even measured the placement of the nails in the

wall. The work is vaguely haunting and minimalistic. One wall is predominantly white with a section of the

wall painted green -- an area where water damage occurred in the real basement. The recreated space

seems to double as a container for loss as well as a space where other artists, at Radawec's urging, hung

some of their own works. Radawec has created an odd sort of "set" that could very well belong in a

Hitchcock flick, perhaps a previously unvisited section of the Bates Motel. The environment is strange in its

bareness, and the fact other artists hang their work in a sacred childhood space is both arresting and

jarring. EVE WOOD is the author of Love's Funeral (Cherry Grove Collections).