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2/11/2001

Structures of Knowledge

Raid Projects, Los Angeles

Kim Abeles, Arthur Aghajanian, Mark Bennett, Greg Colson, Meg Cranston, Dustin Ericksen, Arzu Arda Kosar, Michael Minelli, Renee Petropoulas, Holli Schorno, Yelena Tokman

Structures of Knowledge is an exhibition that focuses on contemporary artworks that subvert familiar classification systems and draw unexpected connections between people, facts and ideas. The art here utilizes graphic systems that quantify and organize information in order to explore a range of meanings. These works connect numerous ideas together while achieving their own kind of legitimacy, questioning our faith in common logic, and opening the door to issues central to the construction of knowledge in the modern world.

The pervasiveness of classification systems all around us attests to the needs of a society that depends upon statistics to understand daily life. This exhibition attempts to examine these systems through a critical focus on representational models utilized for data collection and statistical organization. Artists here explore the possibilities of charting and ordering information through a personal lens that works against habitual ways of seeing the world. The way in which sign systems function, and the nature of the information they convey, is explored here by artists of great diversity. Through widely different approaches, each artist inquires into what knowledge has come to mean in today's world. Yet, underlying all the works presented is the conviction that all knowledge is constructed, and that its acquisition is ultimately a highly individual matter.

By recording the idiosyncrasies of their own subjectivity through familiar graphic systems, these artists make us aware of the manner in which we come to find meaning in our lives according to conventional ways of understanding. These works demonstrate how the form that information takes effects how we understand it. For the artist, the process is one of ingestion, where visual conventions are absorbed, processed through a personal filter, and remade in a new form, the original representational format altered to suit specific ends. Through this approach, these artists draw fascinating connections between various ideas through playful subversion while their works achieve a logical structure of their own.

By reinvesting what are normally considered objective systems of knowledge with highly personal content and unexpected formal strategies, the logic of the graphic formats the artists adopt is put into question. Opened up in its place, we find a new world, where ideas are connected in fascinating new ways, allowing us the opportunity to question the things that are said to constitute knowledge in contemporary experience. In all the works presented in this exhibition, we find that the author has shifted position from the anonymity of the statistician to the absolute specificity of the desiring subject.


Raid Projects is an artist-run non-profit curatorial organization. We are dedicated to promoting an exchange of cultural production and discussion through various exhibition models on a regional, national and international basis by emerging and established contemporary artists. We host 12 projects per year in the gallery in Los Angeles and 6-8 projects per year in external alternative, commercial, institutional, and/or appropriated spaces world-wide. These projects encompass all areas of contemporary practice, including painting, sculpture, film, new media, digital, and performance.

Opening reception, Saturday, November 3, 7-10pm

Gallery hours: Saturdays 12-4 PM and by appointment

Ed Giardina
9322 Litchfield
Huntington Beach, CA 92646
Pager: 714-351-2118
Fax: 714-848-9004
e-mail: Giardina1@aol.com

Raid Projects
602 Moulton Los Angeles, CA 90031
323.441.9593

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