March, 2004

Current Exhibit

Aerial

Featuring:

Jose Bellver, Douglas Buis, Sky Burchard, Ron Laboray, Susan Logoreci, Reed McMillen, Mike Vegas, Sabina Ott, Jonathon Podwil, Eve Wood

Opening Reception; Saturday 6th March, 7-10pm

Raid is located at 602 Moulton St. Los Angeles, Ca 90031.

The gallery is open Saturdays from 12-5 or by appointment

Aerial

"the first is the eye that sees,

the second is the object seen,

the third is the distance between them, "

-Albrect Durer after Piero della Francesca

The perception of space is an elemental aesthetic experience. Durer described space as the distance between the eye and the object seen, an absence that reveals all things. It is a grand nothing that propels us into space and evokes the aerial view. The artist like a conduit slows us down and allows us to perceive something seemingly hidden but present.

These artists explore aerial as a motif in many different ways through illusionistic spatial constructions, three-dimensional objects and installations. Rather than dwelling formally on the media or technique of the artists this show will explore the experience of space, how distance (both literally and fiiguratively) creates an opportunity for the viewer to enter the work and how this experience is felt. The language I have chosen is that of spatial poetics and musical cadence; the stress and unstress of voluminous or crowded space.

The artists included in the show are: Jose Bellver, Douglas Buis, Sky Burchard, Ron Laboray, Susan Logoreci, Reed Mc Millen, Sabina Ott, Jonathon Podwill, Mike Vegas and Eve Wood. The artists chosen represent artists from various locations and at various stages of their careers. Biographical information, pictures and reviews are available by request.

Jose Bellver

Glitter, blossoms, confetti, snow, rain, stars and mist are all conflagrations of small objects that like weather baloons reveal overwhelming spatial force. Jose Bellver's work similiarly conjures up cyclonic swirling masses of dark and light. His pieces bend space through expanding and retracting repetitve brushwork. The dark ground is suffused with light marks that flicker like stars or ice crystals each mark like a tiny presence revealing the powerful absence that is all pervasive.

Douglas Buis

Stereoscopic photography mimics the effect of the human eye; two images of a single subject overalpped to create a sense of depth. Wondrous in its concept, stereoscopic images are now synoymous with 3-D movie images of flying saucers. Douglas Buis has invented his own fictitious film director Furter Verein, and compiled these 3-D images as an archive of surveillance photographs in director's private collection. The images are beautifully mysterious. The spatial elements are mesmerizingly complex views of a topographical landscape. Clouds float above a mountainous landscape and although dimensional seem like shadow puppets as they operate like 2-D cardboard cut out clouds that shift above ground.

Sky Burchard

Diagrams offer an at-a-glance all in one summary view of things. Burchard's sculptural installations based on diagrams of video games. They are literalized 3-D versions of 2-D guide book illustrations. Burchard's installations place the viewer in the ultimate, God's Eye view. Like Borge's Aleph, Burchards' pieces present an endless view of a universe with infinite complexity. We are allowed in his work to view everything at once, to both scrutinize and contextualize at the same time; a power reserved perhaps only for a diety. In this work however, Burchard literally has the whole video game universe in his hands.

Ron Laboray

The contribution of Busby Berkely to the art of dance was not formal but visual. Berkely choreographed MGM musicals. Berkely filmed his dancers from above posing and arraging people from an eye in the sky camera. Like a marching band his dancers made formations rather than individual performances. A Berkely dancer’s technique was second to her physical beauty and position in his overall visual image. When an artist like Berkely steps off the ground and starts to command and arrange beautiful girls one is tempted to dismiss the gesture as pure fluff. However, the act of stepping off the ground in order to visualize our location has its roots in the more serious matter of mapping the world.

Ron Laboray’s work combines the pure pop of a Berkely number and the philosophical hubris of Montesquieu; it is both logical and goofy. Laboray’s paintings consist of large maps of the United States with locations highlighted by large bursts of spilled color in rings. The color assignments are based on cartoon characters such as Lisa Simpson and Batman and the locations are popularly named cities such as Springfield. The paint is objectively controlled according to factors like color, population and location. For example, Laboray decided to map the number of people living in Ohio with the name Bart (as in Bart Simpson). First Bart was visualized from above according to hair color, shirt color and pants. Then, the Bart hot spots were mapped using Bart colors. The amount of paint corresponds directly to the number of Barts in a particular hot spot. The paint is then measured and poured through a jig in the order of Bart Simpson’s actual appearance as seen from above.

A logical experiment except that it can’t be entirely controlled or reproduced. Paint, being paint bursts out of the rigidly controlled system designed by the artist and forms specific microenvironments. The resulting images are chaotic and lovely like weather maps gone awry.

Susan Logoreci

Flying into LAX is always a profound experience if only for the rectangles and kidney beans of bright teal blue. The swimming pool shapes cluster around Santa Monica and the West Side of Los Angeles near the ocean and its natural cerulean. The color of the swimming pools is as exotic and perfect as a peacock’s feather. The teal shapes cluster and fan until they eventually give way to parking lots and ultimately the airport itself. I remember one conversation with Susan about the beauty of this vision and how I wanted not to like it. She just smiled and said, " I know people act as though urban sprawl is a cancer. But from above it’s just so beautiful it’s a living thing, it wants to live just like we do."

In ,"Mid-Wilshire," Logoreci takes on a section of the prestigious neighborhood bordering Wilshire boulevard in Los Angeles. Her view is an impossible one that superimposes a vanishing point on top of an aerial view of the neighborhood. The viewer’s eye is led to the vanishing point via two sets of parallel converging white stripes. These stripes flatten and warp the picture plane providing a kind of rhythmic bounce between the foreground and the background. In between the white lines, the small California bungalos sway from the viewer as if seen from a fast moving plane. The contrast of the crowded homes with the blankness of the depopulated white streets creates a jarring sensation that pushes the homes from discreet objects into patterns of life. Indeed rhythmic pattern as evidence of humanity rather than identity is what stands out as the artists overall gesture.

Reed Mc Millen

My experience looking at Reed Mc Millen’s static paintings is one of sensual shock. They buzz on the wall and have the noise and vision of a flickering fluorescent light bulb. After focusing on the image for a while it starts to twitch with the combinations of patterns and air brush paint that seem impossibly soft and complex, my eyes water. Suddenly the whole thing begins to roll up an off to the right, the repetition of pattern within the paint emerging slowly then picking up speed as does the roll in a television’s vertical hold pattern.

These paintings are familiar and the combination of a vision so particular and a view so common leaves me wordless, staring, agape. Here is something I see everyday, the snowy static of broken up television waves. I know what static is, but before seeing Reed Mc Millen’s static paintings I did not truly understand static as a flickering picture of a signal floating in space. My perception has been altered. Now I think of his paintings every time I see static. I think of a vision of painting that is dying, competing for airtime and the lonely artist out there signaling anonymously. There is a sense of blankness and these paintings are as grim as they are beautiful for they say, "nothing" to an audience who simply flips past them en route to the next television station.

Mike Vegas

Mike Vegas’ photographs at first glance resemble planetary surfaces viewed from the Hubbel telescope. You can barely pick out craters, dry river beds and cloud cover from the mysterious surface. In one piece, Untitled #4 appears to be a view of two dark Caribbean islands floating in blue-green water and what appears to be the peachy pink of a coral reef. The second image, Untitled #6 feels as unpopulated and vacant as the previous piece is warm and tropical. Perhaps this is a desert on another planet or a moon with rocky craters.

These photos would remain largely benign and unimportant if they were merely as they seemed to be, aerial photographs. However within the images themselves there is a surprise. The third photograph "Sunbeam" has silvery chromed letters that spell out sunbeam, curving toward the bottom of the image. The text while reasserting the two dimensionality of the photograph references its spatial contemplation, after all why is it a Sunbeam? The word stands up like the Hollywood sign proudly advertising itself. This is a picture of a picture of outer space written in light and flat. The object itself is perhaps an old refrigerator or a car. It is a named mystery like a pulp fiction asteroid hurled through time and presented to us for aesthetic contemplation.

Sabina Ott

The subject matter of Sabina Ott’s work for many years has been landscape. In the past Ott has conceptually layered her paintings with grids and conceptual color references. For example an installation at the Forum for Contemporary Art in St. Louis included striped walls in colors ordered by their location, brown for earth, green for grass, blue for sky etc. This ordered layered universe had references to a ruptured landscape because often the paintings exitsed in an environment rather than being merely contained in their frames on a white wall. If that _expression of dislocation and spatial disruption referenced an odd conception of the figure on the ground Ott’s work now has blasted the figure into a million fragmented pieces multiplying the figure as she transforms the ground.

"What's here is everywhere: layer #2 " (2003- ongoing) is a series of paintings, prints, drawings, installations, decals and architectural models generated from a single digital image of an imaginary landscape. Seen from an aerial perspective, flowers, text and maps are some of the motifs that form this imaginary site. The digital elements are slick decals appropriating the world outside of the white cube existing perhaps on subway walls and car bumpers. They seemed to be destined for a fast moving airplane, their visuals a combination of graphic text and aerial photographs. Conversely the tactile flowers seem to reference a more private experience touched and felt by an individual rather that some kind of slick corporate entity. Perhaps the juxtaposition of these two seemingly dissonant aesthetics is what Ott’s work is all about. She seems to be an artist flying through life and trying to grab a little nature even if its mediated by a lot of culture.

Jonathon Podwil

Jonathon Podwil’s piece, "Huey" is a digitally animated film, shot with a hand held super eight camera,. At first glance the film seems to be stock war footage from the History channel, something from a special on the bombing of Dresden or top secret footage from the lens of a paratrooper. Scene by scratchy scene floats by of an air craft buzzing in space above a mysterious and cloudy landscape of fields, roads and factories. There is however an almost imperceptible difference between the stock footage an what is here. Amazingly all of Podwill’s films are staged with plastic scale models. The ground is the floor of Podwill’s studio, crudely painted to resemble a landscape.

Podwil’s magic is both formal and conceptual; his film hovers between artifice and reality. The image is so convincingly presented that it literally flies under the radar of our perception. Our experience of the aircraft mediated by thousands of viewings erases the experience of actual space and time. When recognized the image almost seems to shudder and the simplicity of its filming is brazen and even obvious. Podwil’s work asks cogent questions about the reality of our time as one of mediated experiences rather than primary ones. However that is not the only subject mined by his work; by recreating the views of military actions his work breathes new life into a symbolic kind of spatial perception; the difference in political perspective based on two opposing views in battle.

Eve Wood

Eve Wood is most well known for her narrative watercolor drawings of animals. Delicate and precise Eve’s animals are tragically locked in doomed relationships. In, "What We Made Together," an Elephant grips the necks of a swan and accidently smothers the poor thing. For the show,Wood has depicted a plane crash directly into the head of an ex-lover who stares like a deer caught in the headlights. It is the metaphor of spatial collision and the emotional impact of falling that brings Eve’s work into this show. Her work is not flashy but ephemeral, almost as though the characters barely have the energy to appear or disappear before the fatal impact, they hover perpetually fixed in time and space.

-Mary Anna Pomonis

Mary Anna Pomonis is an artist and a writer living in Los Angeles. Her most recent review, "Inna Gadda Da Vida Baby" appeared in the January issue of ArtNet.

Gallery Hours are 12 - 5pm Saturdays, or by appointment.

Raid Projects

602 Moulton Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90031

Tel: 323/ 441-9593