Shaheen Modern and Contemporary in Cleveland honors the Bill Radawec legacy

Steven Litt, The Plain DealerThe Plain Dealer
The late Bill Radawec, a nationally admired Cleveland artist who died in July at age 59 after a yearlong battle with lymphoma, was a miniaturist who practiced a gentle art of nuance and fine distinctions.
A retrospective of Radawec’s work, now on view at Shaheen Modern and Contemporary Art in Cleveland, is full of delectable microphenomena, which attune the eye and the mind to small visual events that might easily be overlooked.
A tiny, copper-painted bird lies on its side on a square piece of plywood painted to resemble a piece of turf, which is in turn mysteriously set on the floor in a corner of the gallery. Another bird, this one painted silver, sits in a small wire basket suspended from the gallery ceiling.
On the walls, two small video cameras whir quietly on their mounts, turning this way and that, scanning the interior for some inscrutable purpose not revealed to the visitor. Also on the walls are pastel-hued geometric paintings inspired by paint chips and images of contrails left behind by jetliners in patches of clear blue sky.
A collection of small, wooden boxes mounted on the walls at oddly differing levels might escape notice entirely. But if you get close and peek inside, you’ll be treated to bizarre miniature tableaux, including one in which a woman strips naked at what appears to be an open-air tea party, while a construction worker stands nearby with a coil of cable in his hands and another fellow guzzles a bottle of wine.
The show is an eclectic mix of objects and images resembling the visual equivalents of Zen Buddhist koans, or riddles, that could produce effervescent moments of intellectual bliss if understood properly. Taken as a whole, the show is a fitting introduction, and tribute, to an artist known for having an odd, quirky and eccentric sensibility, liberally spiced with a well-developed sense of whimsy.

View full sizeIbojka Toth-RadawecA whimsical sculptural construction by the late Bill Radawec evokes the mystery of small events which take place around us everyday.

Born in 1952 in Parma, Radawec grew up there as the son of William Radawec, a firefighter, and Irene Radawec, a homemaker. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea in 1974 and pursued a master’s degree at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in 1975 and 76, but he ended his studies short of completion.
Radawec taught in Berea schools from 1979 to 82 and then spent the following decade teaching in Cleveland public schools. It wasn’t until he moved to Los Angeles in 1992, however, that he began attracting serious attention as an artist and as a promoter of works by other artists.
Radawec’s widow, Ibojka Toth-Radawec, explains that in 1992, commercial galleries were closing in Los Angeles because of a recession. Radawec responded by inaugurating a series of exhibitions in the apartments or homes of friends, under the rubric “Domestic Setting.”
The shows caught the attention of the noted critic and curator Peter Frank, who gave Radawec a plug in LA Weekly, which in turn helped turn the shows into something of an underground movement.
“He loved to promote other artists,” Toth-Radawec said.
Radawec returned to Cleveland in 2000 to care for his aging mother after his father’s death. And he continued to produce art and to participate in exhibitions that caught the eye of reviewers from Art in America and other publications.
The show at Shaheen, assembled and installed with the assistance of his widow and friends, is characteristically oddball, with works hung high or low on walls or stuck in corners, as if to require extra effort and to encourage the viewer to take nothing for granted.
The cumulative effect is that of a quiet sense of joy and delight. Radawec never swings for the fences in any individual work but seeks instead to prick the conscience and tickle the funny bone.
Radawec was a conceptual artist, motivated more by ideas than by a drive to fashion imposing objects. His work pulls you in close and asks you to attend to fine details, like a comedian with a flat affect who tells short, droll stories with enigmatic punch lines.
At times, Radawec’s work is autobiographical. One framed panel re-creates a section of plaster wall in Radawec’s Los Angeles apartment, which formed a crack after the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
The images of jet contrails were inspired by the arcs of jetliners changing course on Sept. 11, 2001, after terrorists took control.
It’s not strictly necessary to understand the personal meanings behind Radawec’s work in order to enjoy it. It casts a spell, even if you don’t know the back stories.

View full sizeIbojka Toth-RadawecA small construction hung on a wall in the Bill Radawec retrospective treats viewers to an overhead view of an unlikely scene in a mysterious roomlike setting, in which a woman strips bare while ladies appear to sip tea at a table and a guy in the corner guzzles a bottle of wine.

The most important personal narrative is that of the artist’s romance. He met Toth-Radawec at a gallery opening in Kent in 2004, four years after he returned to Northeast Ohio from Los Angeles. They married on Sept. 16, 2010, on the intensive-care floor at MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland, where Radawec was undergoing treatment.
Toth-Radawec says the ceremony was a first in the history of the unit.
The show at Shaheen is a first attempt to come to grips with Radawec’s artistic legacy. It admits the viewer into an aesthetic world shaped by one of the gentler artists who have worked in the region in recent decades. And it shows that Radawec’s unusual sensibility
lives on in the body of work he left behind.

Related topics: bill radawec, ibojka toth-radawec, peter frank, shaheen modern and contemporary art, steven litt

 

In a Glass Darkly / Elisabeth Sunday’s Spiritus at Tregoning & Co.

By Douglas Max Utter

www.douglasutter.com

 The impact of Elisabeth Sunday’s photographs showing one or two persons in their native landscapes comes in part from imagining how and where they were created. Personal interaction and shared psychological space are implicit in the melting gray and black tones of the images themselves, which show their subjects reflected along the undulating surface of a specially made mirror.  During extended international journeys over the past quarter century Sunday has used this device to establish an unusual ratio between her own sense of self and the persons / personas that ebb and flow through her mirror, taking the psychological measure of observer and those observed alike as she places her subjects at a double remove from direct observation. This distancing technique tends to outflank the usual questions and doubts that often linger in the wake of both documentary and artistic photography, appealing (somewhat in the manner of surrealism) to a different authority: the timelessness characteristic of the unconscious mind. Farther in the background of her work’s content is Sunday’s exploration of her identity as a woman born to a family of successful artists, and as the daughter of the African American stained glass artist and painter Douglas Phillips.

            Sunday’s most recent photographs of men and women living in Ghana, Mali, and Ethiopia are at once forceful and oblique. The figures, dressed in traditional garb or sometimes elaborately painted (as in the case of pictures showing the Koro men of Ethiopia’s Omo Valley region), loom monolithically, expressing a superhuman intensity. Typically Sunday captures an elongated vertical reflection, rushing and bleeding like a single expressive brush stroke. Although Sunday herself is never visible in the frame, she is as much actor as she is director within the drama of these photographs, as she strives to represent not so much the personal characteristics of her subjects, but an essential gesture that connects a given incarnation with the long history of the soul.  

            In the gold-toned silver print titled “Hope” a man stands on the shore. Five long silvery fish are draped over his shoulders and clutched cape-like across his chest – he seems a god from the sea, dressed in a dream. In “Lifeline” another man hugs a large fish, holding its long body against his own and its sharply tapering head next to his face, while just behind him the sea churns enormously, exploding in painterly-looking rhythms below a narrow strip of blank sky. These and other gold-toned silver prints were shot in Ghana and are the fruits of a relationship that Sunday developed over the past several years with five Akan fishermen who still sail hand-hewn boats into the dark waters of the Gulf of Guinea during the hours before dawn. When Sunday asked them to express their love of the sea the results were startlingly iconic, suggesting primordial links between daily human experience and ancient natural forces.

            Implicit in the intertwining skeins of light that bounce across a curved reflecting surface is the recognition that there can be no sure way to capture the rhythms of human life. Sunday’s art is part vision, part accident, and her method is a kind of invocation. She writes about the role of her mirrors (she has had more than one made; last year one became cracked) in a recent blog posting:  “The muse is tuned and waiting for me to engage it and bring out the images, calling them forward.”  Sunday makes it clear that not just the mirrors but the journeys and events surrounding her photographs work together to cultivate the “muse,” deepening and focusing initial inspirations. All of this, as well as her central mirror-recreated trope of elongation, is part of a profound process of personal growth that began for Sunday in 1982, when she had a number of ongoing dreams about Africa. These were what C. G. Jung might have recognized as dreams of deep transformation, calling forth instinctual energies, and their point of departure was an unusual depiction of flattened and elongated women’s heads and faces painted in 1931 by her grandfather, the noted Cleveland School artist and African traveler Paul Bough Travis. In a kaleidoscopic swirl of imagery the dreams went on to show Sunday nothing less than the creation of the world, from mountains to animals and peoples, stretching and bending in great waves across long ages. Sunday’s first trip to Africa was made soon after this intense period of dreaming, as were her initial experiments with mirror photography.

            The largest recent works are 70 inch tall pigment on rag prints from Sunday’s Anima and Animus series. If even her smaller platinum prints often seem to loom, these larger than life figures are all but hallucinatory in the impending power they project. Sunday here is meditating on eternal masculine and feminine energies, using warlike Koro men and nomadic Tuareg women as subjects. The Anima women are hidden under flowing garments, slanting to left or right or reaching upward like dark flames against the steady white curve of a dune. Their dance-like postures show just the angle of an elbow or a knee, suggesting the geometry of the human body swathed in smoky potency, yielding and enveloping.

            The Animus figures rise like tough young trees or spears, rooted somewhere beneath the picture plane. Grace and violence here seem cast together in a solid block, as in Animus 1, which shows a ghost-like figure daubed in white up to the top of his chest. It’s as if the sheer thrust of aggression has fused his arms and legs into a single mass, and his whitened profile tilts downward, like a giant regarding the earth.  As with so many of Elisabeth Sunday’s figures, these seem composed of stone or bone more than living flesh, bent along universal lines of force, long-buried or drowned but astonishingly rediscovered through the photographer’s process and passion.