Opening reception Saturday, January 14th, 6-10 pm

RAID Projects is pleased to announce Margins and Rocks, a solo exhibition of new work by Dana Maiden. Featuring large sculptures, a series of photographs and a video installation, the exhibition locates Maiden’s practice at an intersection between the physicality of sculpture and the disembodied perception of photographic space.

Photographs taken in museums, hotels and vacant lots in Mexico City, Havana, and Los Angeles are the starting points for the multi-media works in the exhibition. Within these locations, Maiden directs her attention to physical margins made of stone, concrete and wood. She then manifests theses materials as recoded photographic objects made from ink and paper. This mirroring effect becomes increasingly complex and self-reflexive as the space of the photograph confronts the space of the gallery three-dimensionally, or unfolds within its own frame. Maiden’s recursive explorations seize fissures in the simulacra, expanding the borders of the images into the tensions of space.

Maiden’s photographic sculptures recall Borges’ description of a map so detailed that it corresponds exactly in size to the territory it represents. The paper map is soon broken down by wind and rain, and the holes in the copy render it obsolete. Similarly, in Maiden’s work, the viewer becomes aware of the frayed edges demarcating our notions of simulation and utility. It is in these margins that Maiden discovers the locus for authorship. Imagining new possibilities for residual objects and places that seem to exist outside the constraints of usefulness, the artist pauses to consider the space behind a billboard, a concrete rimmed plot of vacant land, and the sidelines of a museum’s diorama.

Dana Maiden lives and works in Los Angeles. Her multi-disciplinary practice includes photography, sculpture, video and performance. She earned a BA in Visual Arts, Art History and English Literature from Columbia University (2000) and an MFA in Sculpture and Photography from Claremont Graduate University (2008). She is the 2008 recipient of the Feitelson Fellowship, and has been an artist-in-residence at SOMA in Mexico City, Proekt Fabrika in Moscow, Art Shanty Project in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Anderson Ranch in Aspen, Colorado. Recent exhibitions include the UCR California Museum of Photography, Vincent Price Art Museum, 3rd Moscow Biennale, Open Field at the Walker Art Center, High Energy Constructs, Kristi Engle Gallery, Chime & Co., Cerritos College Art Gallery, Barnsdall Municipal Art Gallery, Solway Jones Gallery, Sea and Space Explorations, Track 16 Gallery, DEN Contemporary and the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art.

and….

Here are links to RAID’s current AIRs

Stephen Parise (SE, FI)

Mindy Kober (US)

Overseen by artist-directors Jason Ramos and Carrie McILwain, RAID Projects is an artist co-operative where participants reside, work, and maintain their studio practice within its facility, living communally among the resident artists and studio-renters. We currently have a live-work space available for an artist interested in sharing in the operational costs and actively participating in helping to realize RAID’s exhibition, residency, and related programs and events. The ideal candidate will be a working artist who will share in the communal duties of life at RAID, help facilitate our international residency program, and other events, discussion groups, film screenings and eventually initiate exhibitions and curatorial projects.

Situated within a converted industrial space on the grounds of the Brewery Art Colony, the selected applicant will share in the rent and other costs required to maintain overhead. The current room and studio offered will be rented at $900 per month, which includes a 300sqft studio space and separate 200sq ft living accommodation, on site kitchen, bathroom, shower, washing machine, included utilities, wi-fi, cable television and use of common areas and facilities.

We need an independent, ambitious and highly motivated individual that wants to participate directly and powerfully in the LA art scene.

If this sounds like an opportunity you wish to explore, please contact RAID Projects directly at raidprojects@yahoo.com.

The studio space will be available Dec 1st – the room will be available January 1st (possibly sooner). Temporary living accommodations can be made during the December gap if necessary.
www.raidprojects.com

Check out these interviews by RAID Director Jason Ramos with the curators of Imposter and one of the exhibited artists, courtesy of Russell Ryan and LA Videostudio

RAID Projects  602 Moulton Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90031.

Opening reception with the artists Saturday Oct.15 from 6-10pm. Regular gallery hours are by appointment.

Gallery hours Saturday Oct 29th, 12-5 pm

(Portland,OR-) Partnering with RAID Projects in Los Angeles, Jenene Nagy and Josh Smith are pleased to announce the opening of TILT Export: Imposter, featuring work by Ben Buswell, Paula Rebsom, and Heidi Schwegler. Paul Valéry wrote in The Art of Poetry “Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.” By tying the word “imposter” to this exhibition we implicate art and its cohorts, truth and beauty, as being complicit in an ancient conspiracy. TILT Export: Imposter seeks to explore the contemporary human condition with regard to content, material, and bias.

Ben Buswell is a visual artist living and working in Portland, Oregon. His work has been shown nationally at venues including Tilt Gallery and Project Space and IGLOO in Portland, and Fivepoints Arthouse in San Francisco, among others. In 2006 his work was included in the Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum curated by Jennifer Gately. Buswell’s work for this exhibition has been funded in part by the Oregon Arts Commission and the Ford Family Foundation.

Paula Rebsom was born and raised in Dickinson, North Dakota where she spent a great deal of time exploring the diverse landscape and historical sites throughout the state with her family. She divided her time equally between her mother who taught her how to sew and rummage, her father who taught her how to hunt and become an excellent markswoman, and her older sister who tried desperately to use Paula’s small fingers as a key to open up the locked cupboard doors with chocolate behind them to no avail. As a maker of images and objects, Rebsom’s work has been represented by Tilt Gallery and Project Space where she has had two solo exhibitions. Most recently Rebsom has exhibited at the Art Gym at Marylhurst University and Samson Projects in Boston. In 2008 she was a recipient of the prestigious Individual Artist Fellowship offered through the Oregon Arts Commission.

Heidi Schwegler explores a wide range of materials in the service of very depressing subject matter. Schwegler constructs artifacts and objects from resin, metal, wood, wax, found objects and digital media. She has participated in numerous group and solo shows, including exhibitions at the Tacoma Art Museum, the Hallie Ford Museum and at Disjecta Interdisciplinary Art Center where her exhibition Wrest was reviewed in Art In America. Schwegler is a recent recipient of a Hallie Ford Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship, and several RACC Individual Project Grants.

TILT Export: is an independent art initiative with no fixed location, working in partnership with a variety of venues for its exhibitions. Founded by Jenene Nagy and Josh Smith, former curators of Tilt Gallery and Project Space, TILT Export: serves as a catalyst for opportunity, awareness, and the challenging of ideas through art making.

http://www.tiltpdx.com/

Eylem Aladogan (Netherlands)
Jowan Van Barneveld (Netherlands)
James Marshall (Australia)
Irina Novarese (Germany)
Reynold Reynolds (Germany)
Aili Schmeltz (US)

RAID Projects presents

Katherine Gray and Eric Huebsch 
Adrift In A Glass Bottom Boat

September 17th, 7-10 pm

Huebsch and Gray offer both a glib and grim environment of lost paradises and burst bubbles, an ended world at the bottom of the sea. Adrift In A Glass Bottom Boat is a group of shared visions and responses to the gap between man and nature, and an attempt at preserving the illusion of the latter.

Facebook invite

Zoè Gruni (Italy)

and

Emma Gasson (UK)

Opening reception Saturday, August 6th, 7-10 pm

Shorn From the Black Tusk of the Great Destroyer is a group exhibition curated by Adam D Miller in tribute to, and inspired by the Godzilla film franchise. In 1954, Ishiro Honda’s film Gojira spawned a new wave of Japanese Science Fiction, and introduced the world to a monster that would eventually become synonymous with Japanese culture. Godzilla was the first in a long series of daikaijū monsters, or giant creatures known for Toho’s rubber suit aesthetic. In all of these films the monster plays a dual role. In the early movies he was both the destroyer of society, and also man’s greatest technological achievement; in these early films Godzilla is the antagonist fighting against the Japanese government.

As the franchise progressed new monsters were brought in for Godzilla to battle, and the creature’s role shifted; he became both the protector of Japan and also its annihilator. The role of destruction is almost as important as the monster himself in these films. Toho studios became famous for their use of miniatures in creating scenes where in whole villages and even the city of Tokyo are decimated by the violence and chaos brought on from Godzilla’s wrestling and radioactive breath. In each of the 29 films, the viewer is treated to scene upon scene of Japan being stomped into the ground, and torn apart by giant writhing beasts, and yet the film ends on a positive note. These are not natural disaster films where the destruction is devastating, instead the Godzilla pictures end happily as Godzilla defeats another monster that threatened to destroy the Earth and he swims back to his isolated sanctuary on Monster Island; in the next movie Japan is rebuilt with no mention of its previous downfall.

In these films destruction, chaos, and negation become a catalyst for rebirth, for celebration, and for creativity. As we watch Godzilla tear a sky scraper in half we cheer and hope that he’ll burn another down to ground. The artists chosen for the exhibition Shorn From the Black Tusk of the Great Destroyer all have a stake in the chaotic, the confused, the violent, or destructive, and use them as a ground for production.

Featuring:
Greta Svalberg
Steven Hull
David Snyder
Michael Decker
Austin McCormick
Adam D Miller

*A zine style publication has been made in a limited quantity of 400 to accompany the exhibition

Facebook invite

And Russell Ryan‘s video below -