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Art in America Feb, 2003 Bill Radawec at Shaheen Contemporary - Cleveland 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. COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc. Beacon Journal art and architecture critic
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 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. Ohio's Premier News, Arts, & Entertainment Weekly 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 Out of the Blue -- A bright, cloudless blue sky marred only by a faint white curving contrail. Clevelanders 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. Free Times Ohio's Premier News, Arts, & Entertainment Weekly Story time with Uncle Bill Page 54 by Lyz Bly Diorama Debauchery 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 “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 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. artnet Magazine Bill Radawec's latest installation, "In the Basement," is both an exercise in generosity and deep personal Zingmagazine William Radawec, "Wired, (Another Basket Case), 1996" by Ann Carter En route to an exhibition at the Scarabb Gallery in Cleveland, I found myself in the midst of a violent works by artists Matthias Dwell, William Radawec and Cindy Smith, all of whom, often, utilize the intimacy of scale with an emphasis on drawing as primary elements in their work. But for the purposes of this discussion, the following focuses on William Radawec's work within the context of the gallery site; its primary relationship to intimate scale as it relates to nature and the conceptual reversal of our often grandiose perception of, and experience in, the natural environment. The placement of Radawec's work utilizes the existing architecture of the gallery to reinforce its content and structure. The sizes of the individual pieces are consistently compact and most frequently scaled according to the actual size of the subject matter at hand. Two corners of the gallery harbor paired works from the "Soul Patch" series, thereby summoning the viewer to "face the corner." The corner, with its tremendous recent historical references (home of the powerful piece by Terry Fox, titled corner push-1, where he spent no small amount of time trying to compress his entire body into the confines of a specific angled space) as site of often small scaled works utilizing tension in the form of support, intrusion or expulsion from the junction, in this case, provides an intimate setting, much like the meeting of two pages in a book. Each soul patch is a rectangular panel positioned at eye level, with one in each pair consisting of "fake grass" (model railroad foliage) concealing a "ground," which, unbeknownst to the viewer, is actually a painting in acrylic on wood. Thus, we have a painted "ground" obscured by real fake grass, a succinct statement conveyed by material, language, and process; the "real" material of representation with the facsimile, or the simulated, and sometimes choose it over the absent or presumed original. On the adjoining wall and in close proximity, hangs a similar soul patch--rectangular, visually dense, walking stick, #14 and walking stick, #15 are wooden dowels of functional walking stick scale, but with walking stick initially was employed by Radawec after witnessing, on television, the Pope's visit to Colorado, where he was presented with a pair of tennis shoes and a walking stick. In white tennis shoes and with his stick, the Pope proceeded to take a walk through the woods. The iconography alluded to is well suited to Radawec's inspiration and sense of humor. The idea of having a stationary walking stick with "nature" already present is indicative of the need not to be invigorated by the natural environment, but to encapsulate it, keeping it present in a domicile or interior public space--just as postcards or paintings of visited or unvisited natural settings often give the viewer the feeling of "being there," or "having been there," allowing escape from the work-a-day world in an urban or suburban surround. One of the defining qualities of traditional landscape painting has been that it places the viewer within the scene represented. In this case, the grandeur one so often admires in the painted or photographed still natural world is humorously plucked out of context, miniaturized, harnessed and brought indoors as a kind of souvenir, not necessarily in reference to a specific experience in nature, but rather in commemoration of the moment the idea of the importance of one's presence in nature becomes articulated. These pieces, as well as others in the exhibition, are placed where they might naturally occur. In one case, sticks lean against the wall after use. In the case of wired (another basket case), abbreviated features describe a small chrome bird, suspended in a basket above the viewer and out of reach. Conceptually, the bird exists in the realm of identification, as one who is out of reach, stationary and contained. But the generous distance between the open top of the basket and the ceiling suggests the possibility of escape. The artist initially conceived this piece in reference to the evolution of the bird from the dinosaur, thus, heading towards eventual extinction. Los Angeles, California Press Release February 14 - March 26, 2004 Bill Radawec creates a delightful junction where language and color unite. In this group of paintings he has combine color with poetry and deadpan humor. Each painting consist of two or more colors taken from pre-manufactured house paint chips that are applied in flat blocks. Until recently, Radawec resided in Los Angeles: it was there he saw beauty in magnificent array of paint chips displayed at hardware stores and custom paint suppliers. Not only did the visual impact touch him, but the names of the colors struck a chord and where his inspiration to make color combination that included titles as words plays the chromes had names that were charming, silly, dramatic, pretentious and down right funny. Hues named, "rhythm", "mediation", "Mayday" and "party hat" were perfect for Radawec's sensibilities. Included in this exhibition are "Personal, Secret", 'Chateau, Champagne, Charlemagne", "Drivin, Rhythm", and "May Day, May Day, May Day, May Day". The similarity between the 2" x 3" paint chips and minimalist and conceptual paintings was not lost on Radawec. Again his wry sense of humor and irreverence make flat bars parodies of modernist masterpieces by Ad Reinhardt, Ellsworth Kelly and early Brice Marden. Studio 360 Nov 9, 2002 (Show #347) This Week Cover Story Hurricane terrifying. Produced by Michael Raphael. Goto Clifford Ross' web site See the photographs by Clifford Ross Earthquake
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