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.
