Raid Projects

Main Gallery: Matt Wardell Presents The Suitcase Meets The Fucked Up Drawing Party

The Suitcase Meets The Fucked Up Drawing Party
www.myspcace.com/fudp
In the exhibition, The Suitcase Meets The Fucked Up Drawing Party, a rendezvous has been arranged between two Los Angeles-based collaborative groups. Each group has a specific agenda (written or un-written, spoken or un-spoken; concrete, organic, or other-wise). Each group’s membership is fluid and in flux, while maintaining certain core collaborators. Both groups engage in the concept of an ‘open’ work. While bound by a collective mission, neither group imposes a fixed reading of said agenda on said membership. The dilemma that emerges is what happens when two such fluid groups come in close proximity.
            Collaboration has long been a strategy employed in artistic production. The benefits lie in the ability to abandon personal responsibility for anything horrible that emerges, to share in the glory of others’ work and claim it as your own, and, at best, a removal of ego; an out-of-body viewing of what can be produced when personal issues of career, fame, or fortune are eliminated.   The specific tactics of The Suitcase and The Fucked Up Drawing Party can be traced to Surrealist party games, or more recently, The Royal Art Lodge.
            The Suitcase emerged from some unresolved drawings of Los Angeles-based artist Kent Hammond. He began exchanging these unfinished works in several suitcases with fellow artists. The idea was to resolve what was unresolved, include additional work to be finished, and pass the suitcase to another artist. During exhibitions, works remain in flux; edited and elaborated, executed and eliminated. Derived from wide-ranging methodologies, the by-products of The Suitcase are bound in conflict resolution. Since its inception, numerous suitcases have been passed around with stops at Park Projects and Upstairs At The Market Gallery.
            The Fucked Up Drawing Party (FUDP) emerged out of UCLA guided by artists Nathan Danilowicz and Daniel Gaines. According to their manifesto (yes, manifesto), “[t]he purpose of a Fucked Up Drawing Party is to get fucked up (i.e. intoxicated) and draw things that are fucked up (i.e. disturbing).” While concerned with the ‘creation of abject imagery’, the specifics of the FUDP are ambiguous. What one person finds abject, or ‘fucked up’, may drastically differ from another. With the hint of a sociological survey, the FUDPs include both artists and ‘non-artists’. At the root is an interest (and engagement) in the perceived taboos of our society. This is the first exhibition of the works that have emerged from FUDPs.

North Gallery: Paul Paiement (US)

Hybrids 5.0

Raid Projects is pleased to present Hybrids 5.0: new watercolor and egg tempera paintings by Paul Paiement. This is Paiement’s first Southern California solo exhibition since his successful museum debut at the Laguna Art Museum and the publication of his award winning book Hybrids 1.0-3.5 (Laguna Wilderness Press). The current work utilizes three-dimensional screen-like overlays that simultaneously reveal and conceal the imagery underneath. The screens are made with wooden dowels and bits of watercolor paper embedded into the supports. The two-dimensional surface references half-tone screens used in commercial printing, while the three-dimensional qualities allude to pixel depth in digital photography.

It would be difficult to argue against the claim that the digital era has changed contemporary life. Only a decade ago, cell phones were more novelty than necessity and PDA meant making-out in public, not handheld device. Paiement examines this confused status of nature, reality, and possibly even the spiritual in late capitalism.

As the series’ title suggests, Paiement’s Hybrids analyze the disparate structures of the natural world as pared against the synthetic, or plastic reality of human existence. But instead of drawing dichotomous comparisons, Paiement’s meticulous constructions conversely point to similarities between the organic patterns and shapes of insects and the design of any number of iPods, cell phones, PDAs and boomboxes. These are playful images underpinned by the possibility of universal architectonics.

As Paiement continues to skillfully play with ideas of manipulation and mass production, the effect, while at times playful, can be chilling. When the science of cloning, and the constant desire to make people, animals, weapons of war, and goods faster and better has reached a fever pitch, these paintings hint at an apocalypse.

Paiement has shown widely in solo and group shows in New York, Italy, the Netherlands, Canada, London, Chicago, and Southern California. His work was most recently featured in solo shows at the Laguna Art Museum and Heather Marx Gallery, San Francisco. Group shows include Re-Presenting Representation VII at the Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY; Bugology at The Armory, Pasadena,CA; and Bug Out of the Box: A New Look at the Contemporary Art, History, and Science of Bugs at the Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, MA; and in Cyborg Manifesto or The Joy of Artifice at the Laguna Art Museum. Paiement's work has been featured in several publications including Art in America, Artscene, Modern Painters, Artforum, Ouest (France), Artweek, Step Inside Design, Communication Arts, Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times, and the New Art Examiner. Paiement received his MFA from the University of Southern California in 1995.

Artist In Residence Project Room: Brian Getnick (US)
Click here to view Brian Getnick's AIR page

The Missing Arm

…this was not the familiar arm that extends the hand towards the door knob, the spoon or pencil. It was not the tool that feeds the mouth, or measures the distance between here and there. The arm became uncanny; a new symbol. It was and was not me.

The work I present at RAID is meant to show a process of reclaiming mastery over a part of my body that was temporarily knocked out of an idea of self hood. I’ve created a series of sculptures, writings, and drawings of bones and muscles that are also characters from a story I was told while in the waiting room at the County hospital. I am searching for a way to show how the retelling of an experience might function to heal the body. Conversely; how might retelling that story gradually bury new information about selfhood that is internal, perhaps only detectable during that brief window of time when a body repairs itself.