Bill_Radawec

Contrail 9-11 Reviews

Beacon Journal art and architecture critic

Goodbye brings the blues

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Page E 5

Edited Version

By Dorothy Shinn

Bill Radawec

2006

Acrylic on canvas mounted on museum board

11" x 14"

Kiss the Sky. The current exhibit at Summit Artspace, is also a kiss goodbye from Laura Ruth Bidwell,

curator there since it open nearly five years ago. With the new Akron Art Museum opening this month, it

seemed appropriate for the free public gallery to present an exhibition related to the Viennese architects

Coop Himmeb(l)au, who designed the new building. “In German, ‘himmel’ means ‘sky’ and ‘blau’ means

‘blue’,” wrote Bidwell in her press release for the show. And that’s significant because of the three artist

chosen for her final show - Charles Beneke, Bill Radawec and Sandra Yocum – all focus only on the sky,

and two limited their palettes to blue and white. Radawec, who defines himself as a conceptual artist, is

showing paintings from his collection titled “Out of the Blue,” based on contrails, the streaks of

condensed water vapor ice crystals from the wake of aircraft. Uncannily, Radawec uses almost the exact

same blue for his series of drawings and paintings of contrails, But unlike Beneke’s open-ended concepts,

Radawec had a very specific subject in mind – “this whole series is inspired by 9/11. ”While the contrails

are inspired by the planes hijacked by al-Qaida terrorist on Sept. 11. 2001, the surveillance camera

installed with them is inspired by Western response to those attacks. “Go down toward Goodrich or

Goodyear and you’ll see cameras atop the red lights just like they have in England…. only my cameras

are fake,” he said, grinning. “It was neat at the opening. People didn’t know these were fake. They were

waving at them or just standing there looking at them. I have two: one at grownup height and one at

kid height.” Some of the works are white pencil on blue paper, others are paintings, white on blue

acrylic.” The blue of his drawings and paintings is based on the old blue screens once universally used as

backdrops in television and film productions. “I like it. It’s a nice shade of blue, he said. “Now they use a

kind of yucky green.” He said he picked blue-screen because of the way the media treated United Flight

93, the hijack plane that crashed in a field just outside Shanksville, Pa. “There was this whole controversy

that it didn’t crash, that it landed in Cleveland; or that the passengers didn’t take it over and crash it, but

it was shot down by our own air defense. “It’s like the urban legends that we never landed on the

moon,” which he said is almost believable when you see outdoor sets at places like Paramount Studios in

Hollywood. “They have this huge blue screen outside to do outside shots” so when they shot against it,

they can put in any background they choose. Each of this works has a single white contrail against an

unvaried blue background. Viewers are invited to read into these pieces they choose, as long as it has to

do with 9/11. “But the thing is my favorite artist is Barnett Newman, “famous for paintings consisting of

a monochrome surface divided by a single vertical line, dubbed by Newman the “zip.” For Newman, the

structural symmetry of the zip neutralized the issue of the composition, obliterating any sense of the

painting as an art object and thus precious. “These sort of look like zip paintings,” Radawec said. “That,

and the name zipper was coined in Akron. That’s why they named the (University of Akron) teams the

Zips. So much for mystery.

West Side Leader

Sky's the limit in Summit Artspace show

July 12, 2007

Page 22 and 25

Edited Version

By Roger Durbin

As the Akron Art Museum is set to reopen its doors after its expansion and remodeling project, its

neighbor, Summit Artspace, is doffing its artistic hat with the exhibit Kiss the Sky, which will be on view

through Aug. 4. The title of the exhibition nods to Akron Art Museum's architectural firm, Coop

Himmelb(l)au, where in German "himmel" means heaven or sky and "blau" means blue. As curator Laura

Ruth Bidwell said, the new museum "building soars off into the sky as well." Artist Radawec reads the sky

altogether differently. His seemingly evenly divided drawings on paper and acrylic works on canvas are

arranged in an arcing pattern around three walls in a separate room in the Summit Artspace facility.

Each image in the series "Out of the Blue, the Turn Around" has a background of clear sky blue from

edge to to edge on which he dipicts through meticulously crafted pencil marks the wisps of vapor (or

contrails) that trail back from high - flying aircraft. As inspiration for this collection, Radawec wondered

about the fateful day of Sept. 11, 2001, When Flight93 (which ended up destroyed in a field in

Pennsylvania) turned its course somewhere above his house before it headed back toward Washington

D.C. He imagines in his art that he walked out his door that day, looked up and saw the 757 jet leaving

a huge contrail as it veered its course. It would have been for him "a line-of- sight connection with history"

in the making. The idea perhaps gains most moment in one work where the white line of smoke looks as

though it is plummeting directly toward the ground. Sept. 11, 2001 aside, the images can lead a viewer

who knew nothing of that day into all sorts of imaginings. Many thingscome to us "Out of the Blue" and

amount to a great "Turn Around" in our lives.

Free Times

Ohio's Premier News, Arts, & Entertainment Weekly

Turning Point: Bill Radawec Remembers Flight 93

Volume 14, Issue 39

Published January 17th, 2007

By Doug Max Utter

Movement is identity. Each twitch, every decision and reaction leaves a trace, a track inscribed - If only in

the molecules of the air - as a stroke in the universe's ongoing self-portrait. We all do our part.

Interpretation is harder, though, like the recent NASA photos of a "mudslide" on Mars that may be

evidence of subsurface water, or may just look like that. The dots we connect sometimes are a match only

in our imagination. For instance, when United Flight 93 was hijacked on that fateful September morning,

it was somewhere in the airspace over Parma, Ohio, perhaps directly over the artist Bill Radawec's

house. On that lovely, clear, late-summer morning, the sky was blue and the 757 jet would have left a

huge curving contrail as it abruptly turned and headed toward its doom, ultimately falling to earth in a

strip mine near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. In the 30 small paintings and drawings that make up his solo

show Out ofthe Blue, Radawec imagines walking out his door not far from Ridge Road and looking up,

just at that moment of turning, forming a line-of-sight connection with history. The paintings are hung at

different heights around exit's two galleries; some are less than five feet up from the floor, others hover

near the ceiling, and all are spaced fairly far apart, conjuring the wide expanse of open sky. In the

paintings the blue is rendered in acrylic, but the contrails themselves are meticulously drawn in dense

accumulations of white-colored pencil marks. The illusion is nearly perfect. Radawec has depicted straight

sections of vapor, heading right toward the ceiling, and strong, thick ones that cut boldly across the

canvas like one of abstract expressionist Barnett Newman's famous "zip" paintings. Others are seen as if

at a greater height, sharp and clear ending with ominous abruptness. It's as if the mystery of 9/11 and

its decisive events were written on the sky. Extrapolating from Radawec's reverie, every contrail since has

been commentary on that day's tragic text. Over the past two decades Radawec has engaged in various

projects that sketched a relationship between mark-making a deliberate expressive activity, and

accidental aesthetics that time and nature inscribe. It's worth mentioning that these are by no means his

only concerns. Speaking to a group of students recently, he came up with a list of words and subjects

that sample his own interests. Running from "atomic bomb" and "cooking" through "fireman" and "stand -

comedy," it also mentions growing up in the 1960's, Hieronymous Bosch and Vermeer. There are 72

entries, all of which have been part of his thinking and process at one time or another, and no doubt he

could easily add as many more. Probably that's not unusual for an artist in these intellectually engaged,

polymorphic times, but the list does serve to remind us that everything we do and make is constructed

from layer upon layer of intention and experience. Also known as a curator here and in Los Angeles,

Radawec pioneers informal exhibition spaces with a highly innovative exhibition style, like the series of

shows he mounted in friends' homes in the Los Angeles area. Collectively called Domestic Setting, those

exhibits garnered some national interest, Art News, Art Forum, Flash Art,and Art in America. Later, in

the fall of 2002, a couple of years after his return from a decade on the West Coast, the artist/curator

began to put together exhibits in a gallery the size of a child's bedroom, built for him by Cleveland artist

Matt Dibble in a corner of "superior, a gallery space," it offered Cleveland audience in art communities

and university departments around the country. During these past seven years he also mounted several

shows of his own work, first at Shaheen Contemporary and Moderndowntown, and later at Per Knutas'

raw & co in Tremont. Crack - ups at Shaheen showed elaborate pencil and paper reconstructions of

sections of Radawec's apartment walls in Venice, California. Each was an exact replica of damage

caused by the Northridge earthquake, which shook Radawec and a few million other Californians awake

early in 1994. As in Out of the Blue, the artist is obsessively reliving a moment in time over and over

again, like a diamond stylus running in the same groove on an old LP. It's hard to tell whether the

analogue experience he generates is intended to close a cognitive gap caused by a catastrophic moment

in time, when everything suddenly veered, damaged, toward a different destiny; or perhaps these works

aim to put themselves between the wound and the weapon, reconfiguring the real. Either way, Radawec

proposes a hall of mirrors to the mind. A post - minimalist/conceptualist in orientation, he seeks the

essence of things, but with an autobiographical slant that usually accompanies a more expressive

manner; post - minimalists tend to park the personal at the gallery door. The late Fred Sandback, for

instance, whose work would figure prominently on any list of Radawec's influences and mentors, become

famous over the past 40 years for his deceptively simple geometric constructions made with strands of

string and yarn, transforming the way audiences perceive interior space. Those extraordinary sculptures

steadfastly refuse to be either two or three - dimensional, instead suggesting the pure volumes of a

transcendent realm, magically translated to real space and time. The constructions at Crackups and the

paintings at Out of the Blue do something similar as they recollect the subjects - death - and the sort of

transcendent space that death occupies in relation to ordinary, daily life. Another of Radawec's themes is

what he calls "fake nature" and the way that nature imitates art when it invades man-made structures.

Much of the landscape of Los Angeles is notably a conversation of that kind, between cosmos and

cosmetics - but of course that could be said of any contemporary city, even Cleveland. Things like the

contrails of modern jets, which are nothing if not fake clouds, are another case in point. That the coin of

art is always forged is half of Radawec's ongoing thesis; the other half is the disturbing fact that the

reality we buy with it is death.

Scene

Arts

Out of the Blue

Published January 17, 2007

By Zachary Lewis

Out of the Blue -- A bright, cloudless blue sky marred only by a faint white curving contrail. Clevelanders

gazing upward on 9-11 might have seen something like that, if it's true that the fourth hijacked plane did

indeed turn around over Northeast Ohio on its way toward Washington. Launching into another

completely new line of work, Parma artist Bill Radawec here imagines how that patch of sky might have

looked in a size and shape vary considerably, from notebook- and poster-sized to narrow horizontal

strips. The rest is nothing but white pencil, depicting various arcing jet exhausts from different

perspectives. There are 30 examples here and many more in storage. Most hang near the ceiling, forcing

viewers to participate vicariously by looking up. Simple, perhaps, but the overtones are complex, and

the interpretive potential is as boundless as the possibilities a blue screen represents. It's a strange

exercise, pondering Cleveland's oblique relationship to such a momentous event. And Radawec himself

has long been fascinated by these sort-of-close encounters with tragedy (the first being the suicide of his

artistic idol). More important, no one who noticed one of these contrails that day would have suspected

the horrible reality. In fact, they may even have smiled, assuming they'd seen a stunt plane. How wrong

they would have been.

A Study Reviews

artnet Magazine

Bill Radawec
"In the Basement"
at the Irvine Fine Art Center

"In the Basement"
Basement Memories

by Eve Wood

Bill Radawec, "In the Basement," Mar. 8-Apr. 13, 2003, at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, 14321 Yale Avenue, Irvine, Ca. 92714

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).

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

Free Times

Ohio's Premier News, Arts, & Entertainment Weekly

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.

Crack-Ups (earthquake) Reviews

Art in America

Feb, 2003

Bill Radawec at Shaheen Contemporary - Cleveland
Thomas McEvilley

Bill Radawec was living in Los Angeles when the big earthquake of 1994 hit. His apartment developed cracks in the walls at about 40 places. He decided to make an art work of the earthquake damage. Ascending a ladder, carrying a drawing board, he drew each of the cracks in detail and measured the depths of the various parts of each fissure, which were between one and five millimeters deep. He marked the corresponding parts of each drawing with a number, 1 through 5, to indicate the depth of the fissure at that exact point.

Then he took sheets of paper one millimeter thick. On the first one he drew the uppermost layer of a crack and cut it out with an X-acto knife. Putting another sheet underneath that one, he drew the parts that were one millimeter deep, and cut them out. Then, with another sheet, he drew the parts that were two millimeters deep, cut them out, and so on. The drawing was done with pen, pencil and Wite-Out. Finally each crack was represented by a stack of five sheets that replicated it in three dimensions. In each case the uppermost sheet was painted the color of his walls at the time, a pale tan. The 40 or so obsessive drawings were then framed.

The result is a series of trompe I'oeil representations of earthquake damage rendered so precisely and convincingly that, upon seeing them, one at first thinks the artist removed the sections of plaster and framed them. Even upon close inspection they do not reveal themselves as representations, but seem real.

The glimpses of damage are esthetically appealing. Each drawing turns out to have a particular allure that is unique. Yet, despite their credibility and charm as drawings, they clearly partake of the spirit of conceptual art. In fact, they treat a classical theme of conceptual art that might be called the problem of the wall. In the 1960s and early `70s, conceptual artists in general regarded the wall with suspicion, as the site of painting, which seemed polluted by its long-standing complicity with the market system. Earlier, Duchamp had responded to this feeling by placing his works on the floor or hanging them from the ceiling, avoiding the ideologically saturated wall. In the early conceptualist period many variations on this theme were rung, by William Anastasi, Lawrence Weiner and others.

Radawec has produced an elegant variation on this theme 30 years later, when many of the concerns of classical conceptualism are being reinvestigated. His version has traits that show the passage of years and the softening of the austere, earlier principles. Radawec's works, for example, are made by hand rather than by a mechanical method; being drawings, they represent the most traditional of art-school disciplines; they are framed like more traditional art works, although they show only the wall itself; and so on. This elegant and intelligent show encapsulated a good swath of recent art history.

The fact that the works show earthquake damage--and in fact enshrine it--suggests the deep damage that the quake of conceptualism wrought to the tradition of the artist's hand and its touch. Yet, with an ironic circularity that is another classical conceptual theme, they represent this deep fissure in art history through the very qualities of drawing, hand and touch that the original conceptualists hoped to destroy forever.

Studio 360

Nov 9, 2002 (Show #347)

This Week

COVER STORY
Natural Disaster
Kurt Andersen and writer Sebastian Junger talk about why our culture is drawn to the menace, and beauty, of natural disaster.

Hurricane
The photographer Clifford Ross has spent several years chasing down Hurricanes along the East Coast. Waist-deep in the stormy water, Ross captures the moment when the waves turn from ominous to terrifying. Produced by Michael Raphael.
Goto Clifford Ross' web site
See the photographs by Clifford Ross

Earthquake
The 1994 Northridge Quake in California killed 56 people and caused $20 billion in damage. As scary as the ‘94 disaster was, one artist in Los Angeles found the aftermath in his apartment building inspiring. Produced by Matt Holzman.
Go to a review of Bill Radawecs “Crack-Up” exhibit
Go to a review of “Crack-Up” at Zing Magazine

Godzilla
If you thought Godzilla was a symbol for the atom bomb, you were half right. He also stands in for a threat the Japanese have lived with for centuries. David Kalat, author of “A Critical History” of the Godzilla series, J.D. Lees of “G-Fan,” and Chris Holland and Scott Hamilton of stomptokyo.com connect the forces of nature to the world's most destructive lizard. Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.
Go to David Allender's obscure film site
Go to G-Fan.com a bi-monthly Godzilla zine
Go to Stomp Tokyo, devoted to B-Movies and Godzilla

SPECIAL GUEST
Sebastian Junger
Sebastian Junger wrote The Perfect Storm, the best-selling nonfiction book about a Gloucester fishing crew lost in an extraordinary North Atlantic hurricane. His most recent book, Fire, is a collection of stories from various dangerous journalism assignments, ranging from battle in Afghanistan, to fire fighting in the American northwest.
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Go to the Perfect Storm Foundation
Go to a bio of Sebastian Junger